Answers to: backup/restore third party ppa's

Answer by hilyard

hilyard — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:29:13 -0400

I would suggest learning and using PERL. I'm not good enough to tell you off the top of my head, but scripts that do similar things as you ask are available online and can be modified to suit. I'm learning this useful tool (PERL) myself -- not so much because I want to, but because it makes life easier.

Answer by Gareth

Gareth — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:20:20 -0400

Just copy the /etc/apt/sources.list file to a location, then after install copy it back and you will have all your ppa's referenced.

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /media/{external_device}

A lot easier than re-adding the PPA's after. This also has the advantage that it will also retain any additional, non-launchpad repositories you may have added.

Answer by guerda

guerda — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:09:35 -0400

If you use the command add-apt-repository, all your custom ppa are added to the folder /etc/apt/sources.list.d/.

It contains all information for this ppa. So just back up this folder, restore it and you're done:

tar -cvjf mysweetppas.tar.bz2 /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
sudo tar -xvjf mysweetppas
sudo apt-get update

To re-use the ppa you defined in /etc/apt/sources.list, you can do the following as root (!):

cp /etc/apt/sources.list /media/[your external drive]/
cat /media/[your external drive]/sources.list >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update

Note that you will have duplicates in your sources list! So review it before installing new software!

Good luck!

Answer by Troy

Troy — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:07:23 -0400

I ended up writing a small shell script that uses:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:<repository-name>

The information was from here. For this to work you need to install:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

After a clean install I'll be able to run the shell script and the ppa's that I use will be updated.