Okay, I have two hard drives mounted in my system, a 40GB drive and a 200GB drive. The 40GB has Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for the entire drive (ext3, I believe). The 200GB drive is purely a data drive (reiserfs).

I have made a lot of customizations to my environment, user/home directories, and to the installed software.
Basically, I want to be able to easily re-load (from the 200GB data drive) exactly the system I have right now (on my 40GB Ubunutu drive) if I crash or screw up some config file somewhere.

In Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, how do I:

1) (a) Make a copy/list of all the currently installed software such that I could easily re-install.
OR (b) Actually download all of the package files that are installed for easy re-installation?
2) Re-install from my as per #1 if I crash in the future? (I want to print this in case I lose internet connectivity through such a crash.)
3) Backup my user/home directories?
4) Re-load such user/home directories?
5) Make a user's environment the default for future/added users on this system. Assume "wmeler" is the current user who I want to clone.
6) Backup application settings/configurations for user "wmeler"
7) What am I forgetting or not considering?

Thanks in advance. Have used Linux for years, but have never done a backup. Scary, I know.

You could use rsync, tar, amanda, or bacula to make your backups. But if what you're really after is a good way to recover from total death (boot records, partitions, data, EVERYTHING), check into mondoarchive, systemimager, or mkcdrec. They can create ISO images, suitable for burning to a CD/DVD/booting from network, to put EVERYTHING back exactly like it was.

2 members found this post helpful.

Excellent/helpful response. Follow up questions:

1) Which of these utilities do people recommend using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS?
2) Also, how do I put such an ISO on a clean USB stick/thumb drive?

You can use any of them. They're all free, so give them each a try, and see which fits your needs best.
From what I know, you can try to extract the ISO image to a USB drive, then use syslinux to make it bootable. However, the ISO's that are created by the backup programs are usually made to be burned to an optical media, or booted from over the network.

In the single best article I've seen in over eight years of using Linux, I found two relevent notes:

1) backintime-gnome is apparently a decent choice for backups
2) UNetbootin allows you to create bootable USB sticks

Sweetness.