Backup operating system into installable media

I believe you can do that with Clonezilla.

Or perhaps with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remastersys

@akirashinigami clonezilla seems to backup partition and not make installable media of current installed os

@lembas Remastersys page for ubuntu & derivative, mentions few caution points. Do you also have some to add to that based on your experience.

Clonezilla makes a complete clone of your extisting drive, so you don't need to do a reinstall.

Simple but less effective approach:
dd if=/dev/your-disk of=/some-path-with-enough-free-space

dd works from pretty much any live distro.

More effective:
http://freecode.com/projects/rear

@lembas @Darksoul71

I have got remastersys & rear. As it will take considerable time & attention, I will try them out (hopeful over the weekend) when i can get free time.

Thanks for your replies.

Finally got time and tried out remastersys & rear.

remastersys dist gave segmentation fault error.

@Darksoul71
Does rear creates installable media of distribution like 'remastersys dist'?
'rear mkrescue' created just a 33mb iso.

Rear behaves as expected.

Did you check out there documentation ?
http://relax-and-recover.org/documentation/

mkrescue as parameter will only create a boot media which you can use to recover the saved data itself. You will need to use a second HDD (may be USB) or simply a NAS to store your backup. Then run rear with parameter
mkbackup. It is also important to run rear as root.

Like this:
sudo usr/sbin/rear -v mkbackup

HTH,
D$

@Darksoul71

Thank-you for replying. Its now clear to me that Rear is not creating an installable media of OS, but rather the whole HDD backup & uses a bootable rescue to recover.

My concern is not regarding the partition setup or personal data, but the os & installed apps & updates.

'remastersys dist' seems to be what i need. Sadly, its giving error.

@aragonm:
>Thank-you for replying.
You are welcome !

>Its now clear to me that Rear is not
>creating an installable media of OS,
Sorry, it still remains a mistery to me what you mean by "installable media of the OS".

Are you looking of some kind of Trisquel un-attended ?

I mean: To some point the result of restoring your system from a REAR backup to another system will result in the same.
A running system with your installed apps. Another approach would be a taylored live CD where you set up a target disk with your partition settings and simply copy your complete system to the target drive via rsync.

@Darksoul71
Installable media of OS, meaning, an iso file which i can use to install the OS on a computer.

After installing from basic iso that is available on site, over time lot of updates were made, apps were removed, app were installed.
I do not want to re-do everything in case of re-install or installing on different system. As, it'll take more time & be a waste of bandwidth.

Complete backup of hdd will be like a snapshot.
Installable iso will be more neat & fresh approach.

I so hope that remastersys works.

Regarding tailored live cd approach; is it possible for you to give me link to its documentation?

aragonm,

I am afraid that there is no documentation on how to modify live CDs. I mostly opened up the ISO from the Live CD, added my content and burned the ISO. This almost always works.

Frankly I see no big difference between having a taylored installable media with automated installation versus having a diskspace effective backup of a freshly installed system (e.g. with REAR). Both will (hopefully) result in a fresh system according your requirements.

I do not know about your use case and have never tried to automate System installation for Linux but my previous experience with WinXP un-attended CDs is this: You either spent a loooooot of time to keep your master CD fresh (new version of drivers / tools, exchange of tools, modification / optimisation of system settings) or you will soon have a deprecated installation CD.

Modern Linux distribution (Ubunutu, Trisquel, Linux Mint, etc) make the installation pretty straight forward. So unless you do tons of changes to the basic installation, you should be able to set up a fresh system with only a few mouse clicks (e.g. keyboard settings, hostname, timezone, user & password). A quick "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" after the installation will ensure you have the latest stuff on your system.

A simplistic approach could be a small bash script on a modified Trisquel ISO which installs the tools you are used to via sudo apt-get install . This bash script could also do modifications of config files via simple sed command or copying pre-configured files to the corresponding dirs.

The more complex approach could involve partitioning the drive by a given scheme via sfdisk:

From the sfdisk man page:
Dump the partitions of a device in a format useful as input to sfdisk. For example,
% sfdisk -d /dev/hda > hda.out
% sfdisk /dev/hda < hda.out

Mount the new generated partitions in a Live environment and simply rsync or unpack the full directory structure of your source system over to the newly generated filesystems.

Trisquel is pretty small. In fact I run a Trisquel installation from a small 16GB USB stick with a lot of stuff installed.

Thanks Darksoul71, those are a lot of ideas.

The apt-get update upgrade install is exactly what i want to avoid. Bandwidth is of concern and reusing is a preferred option. Changes made are considerable. So, deprecated installable media of in-use OS will still be better than basic iso. Diskspace backup is a solution, but is less pristine than an installable media.

I will look into the many approaches in the following days. Hopefully i will be able to find success in one of them.

Remastersys is good, relatively easy to install, after you have played around with it easy to use , I've used it for a couple of months.
The only drawback is that it can only handle up to 4 GB (this is nothing to do with Remastersys) So if you have a large home folder you need an external back up USB or external hard drive.
If anybody is interested will post how to install.

For space efficient backup this might be worth a look:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_System_Backup_with_rsync