Mint Backup, Restoring question

[KittyCat]

I recently installed Mint through mint4win to play with, to see if the video driver issues that plagued me six months ago had been fixed in Julia. They had, and my wireless adapter worked as well, so all good so far.

I like it enough that I want to put it on the secondary hard drive on my PC and make it the main OS, and use my XP disk only to play games. My question now is, if I use mintBackup to back up my home folder and my installed software, can I use mintBackup in a fresh installation to restore from those two backup files, and get my home folder and applications back that way?

[vincent]

Yes and no. mintBackup will save and restore your Home partition, but it doesn't actually "save and restore" your applications in the same sense...what it does is generate a list of applications you have installed, and then "restore" all your applications by using that list to determine what packages need to be downloaded and installed again. End result should be the same though.

[KittyCat]

Generating a list and installing everything after I've installed Mint to my second drive would work just fine. I was primarily looking for something that would save me the pain of manually reinstalling everything from a list I'd have to make myself.

Thanks again for helping me out! I really appreciate it.

[slider]

Sounds like what you may be looking for is remastersys

Check it out maybe

[KittyCat]

Sorry for the late reply. Life has been a bit hectic recently...

I'll definitely check out remastersys, thanks for the link! If it's not too scary-looking I may try it out. I see only a few terminal commands after my first skim-through, and I'm still a bit wary of doing too much with the command line before I know what I'm doing. I would hate to accidentally break my new OS!

I'll report back with the outcome, whatever it may be. Thank you both for helping!

[KittyCat]

Apologies for the double post... I have noticed in other forums that an edit usually won't flag a thread with "new posts".

I do like the idea of remastersys, but after testing a few of the different repository links, none of them work. I keep getting an error that a Sources.gz can't be downloaded because it's missing, and the program won't install. Very annoying.

EDIT:
Found it on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/remastersys/files/

Since Julia is based on Maverick I downloaded that version, put a blank DVD in the burner and then just double-clicked on the downloaded package. It installed fine, and put an icon to RemasterSys in the Mint menu, so I opened that and ran it. It's at 1% progress now... this might take a while. Just in case it doesn't work, I created back-ups of my home directory and my apps with mintBackup and saved them on a portable drive. Computer rebuilding this weekend!