Quick Re-Imaging

[xnite]

Hello, I am installing Gentoo for the first time, and so fare I'm satisfied with results. However, it has taken over 30 hours to install the base Operating system along with Gnome. This is with minimal breaks, and barely any time spent reading as I have pretty much been reading steps documentation while performing other operations (so, reading documentation during downtime).

I'm of course, running an older machine - a Dell Optiplex GX260.

I am simply wondering if there is a way that, after I have gotten my initial software built & configured, I can create some sort of backup CD which I can use to re-image my system in the future. This way if for some reason I need to reinstall, I can do so, easily, without wasting a bunch of time compiling all of the software over again - but rather have a base system running and just update world from there.

Not sure if I'm getting my point across appropriately, if you need more details or know of a solution, all help would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance, ~xnite~
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[DanneStrat]

Hi,

For creating restorable harddrive images, I use Clonezilla. It's a livecd/liveusb based on Ubuntu/Debian
with backup and restore as main purpose. You can do a "disk to image" (what you described) or "disk to disk" backup.
I've always used an external usb harddrive to store my images, but you can make recovery dvds as well.

Note: Since Gentoo is rolling-release, you probably want to make rather frequent images of your drive so
you don't get too far behind the current state of the portage tree. This way you avoid trouble when you
want to bring a restored Gentoo image up-to-date with emerge.

That's why a usb harddrive with plenty of space would be ideal to store the images. You can keep a
couple of images at all times and delete the oldest one when a new is made.

[John R. Graham]

There's a whole category in the portage tree for solutions to this: app-backup. Look around and find something you like.

- John
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