Hello Bob:

I thought I would save the time that trial and error would occupy by asking fellow slackers first before I tried the following idea for backing up my system:

If I booted the system I wanted to backup (because I want to easily clone it to other machines) from an external drive (so I wouldn't be using the internal system I want to back up), and then mounted my root partition somewhere, and my other partitions, such as /var and /tmp inside the root's mountpoint, such that I could chroot into that directory if I wanted to; if I did all that, couldn't I just cd (not chroot) into that directory, and then use makepkg /path/to/backup.tgz to make a slackpack of my entire system?

It makes sense to me, but I would hate to go through all of that for nothing, so I thought I would ask first.

Thanks in advance. (oh yeah, I'm running slackware 12.2)

Makepkg just uses gzip and tar (more compression formats available in 13.0) to create a compressed archive of a directory and all subdirectories. So you don't need makepkg to do what you want since you could just tar and then gzip yourself, though makepkg does do some other work with symlinks which you can read about in its man page.

Also does makepkg require a slackdesc file? It might fail without one, which would be another reason not to use makepkg.

I recommend you just use clonezilla to clone the system.

Thanks piratesmack: the multicasting feature of clonezilla looks like it will really be a time saver... (i am recycling old computers and giving them to home schooled students, and was looking for a way to batch install); thanks.

It is not hard, though to add an install directory and a 11-line slack-desc file. When recycling ppc computers, I work with the ppc port of slackware, called slackintosh, and there are few precompiled binaries for slackintosh, so I found my self writing slack-desc files so much that I used perl to automate the process. I did overlook the slack-desc in my post, but I think that makepkg would do the job (if I didn't just discover clonezilla)... but as brixtoncalling points out... it is just tar and gunzip with some symlink and ownership scripts... so could just scip slack-desc and use tar and gunzip... whichever's quickest


My only remaining question:

If I used makepkg (or tar/gunzip), and then mounted a different system and used isntallpkg (or tar -zxf) to install the backup.tgz to the different system, I probably would have to run lilo again to make the new system bootable.

What about with clonezilla. Are the clones bootable, or would I have to run lilo again?