Keep a Backup of Installed Packages

by Mark Sanborn on June 24, 2009

Keep a list of installed packages so you can restore all of your applications with one command.

You might prefer to have a clean system on reinstall but sometimes it is nice to reinstall applications from a previous machine/setup. Keeping a backup list of packages will make this a snap. Just give your package manager a list of all the packages you want it to install and let it rip.

Here are the backup and restore methods for each of the major distros/package managers.

Debian / Ubuntu

Backup

dpkg –get-selections > installed-software.log

Restore

dpkg –set-selections < installed-software.log
apt-get dselect-upgrade

Arch Linux

Backup

pacman -Qqe | grep -v “$(pacman -Qmq)” > pkglist

Restore

pacman -S $(cat pkglist)

Fedora

Backup

rpm -qa > installed-software.bak

Restore

yum -y install $(cat installed-software.bak)

Gentoo

Backup

cp /var/lib/portage/world installed-software.bak

Restore

cat installed-software.bak | xargs -n1 emerge -uv

OpenSuse

Backup

rpm -qa –queryformat ‘%{NAME} ‘ > installed-software.bak

Restore

sudo zypper install $(cat installed-software.bak)

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15 Responses

1. Eric Wendelin

   6-24-2009

   

   How could you ever do this on Windows? You’d basically have to Ghost (or whatever) an entire drive. Linux FTW!
2. Erlend

   6-24-2009

   

   openSuse:

   rpm -qa –queryformat ‘%{NAME} ‘ > installed-software.bak

   sudo zypper install $(cat installed-software.bak)
3. Mark Sanborn

   6-24-2009

   

   Thanks Erlend! I added your section to the post.
4. fiber

   6-24-2009

   

   Awesome list…. just a note: you have a stray ” in the restore lines for Debian/Ubuntu
5. Mark Sanborn

   6-24-2009

   

   Fiber, I don’t know where that came from fixed.
6. Eric Floehr

   6-24-2009

   

   Fedora has a daily cron task to take an installed package snapshot, and saves to /var/log/rpmpkgs, so just backup that file every day.
7. Siilex

   6-24-2009

   

   The solution proposed for Debian lists too many packages.
   I usually use this, which is an improvement:
   dpkg –get-selections | grep “\binstall\$” | cut -f 1 | while read f ; do c=$(apt-cache rdepends “$f” –installed | wc -l) ; if (($c == 2)) ; then echo -e “$f” ; fi ; done
   This oneliner shows the ‘root’ packages between installed ones. ‘Root’ means they do not have other packages depending on them.
   This makes the minimal subset of ‘apt-get install’ targets to get a system like the actual.
   Please, notice metapackages are always shown as root, because nobody depends on them. So the result still has some redundancy.
   Enjoy it.
8. sufehmi

   6-24-2009

   

   I usually also backup the /etc

   So when we restore, the reinstalled software will be already configured as it were

   backup :
   tar cvf config.tar /etc

   restore :
   tar xvf config.tar
9. R

   6-24-2009

   

   Super handy
10. Johannes

    6-25-2009

    

    And do you know how to do this on a FreeBSD machine? I think it’s possible too, but I don’t know how.

    Nice site! Thanks for posting!
11. anechoic

    6-26-2009

    

    the line:
    ‘dpkg –get-selections > installed-software.log’

    should be:
    ‘dpkg –get-selections > installed-software.log’

    the M dash ‘–’ is replaced with two ‘–’

    

    ***also, you can export markings in Synaptic which pr0lly does the same thing under the hood
12. Mark Sanborn

    6-28-2009

    

    Good question, I will see if I can dig up some information for you.
13. Rob

    8-3-2009

    

    Sorry to sound like an obvious noob but in order for the restore to work you would also need a backup of the sources.list correct?
14. Mark Sanborn

    8-3-2009

    

    Rob,
    If you use extra repositories it would be a good idea to back it up.
15. zone

    2-6-2010

    

    nice article…learning a lot from here…