Backup Mint and Ubuntu Installed Programs – Aptik

Lets see how to backup Mint and Ubuntu installed programs. So when it comes time to upgrade or to repair a system, here is a couple of ways to backup the installed programs and PPA’s and more.

In Debian, you can use the dpkg command in a terminal window. So open and terminal window and copy and paste the following command. Don’t forget to change out the user name Bob to your home user name.

To backup a list of the installed programs

dpkg –get-selections
sudo dpkg –get-selections > /home/bob/backup/installed-software.log

To restore installed software from a backup List

dpkg –get-selections > /backup/installed-software.log
sudo dpkg –set-selections < /home/bob/backup/installed-software.log

How about all of the PPA’s and extra programs from outside the repository you have installed since you loaded your OS. Here is a great little program with a GUI interface that seems to work well. You can installed it in Mint-18 and Ubuntu from what I have tested.

Aptik is a Automated Package Backup and Restore program that offers you a GUI interface and is very simple to use.

Here a few key features that Aptik can do for you:

  • Themes and icons stored in /usr/share/themes and /icons
  • Applications installed from the Ubuntu Software Centre 
  • Downloaded packages within the APT cache 
  • PPAs and custom repositories (incl.  the packages you install from them)

To install it run the following commands in a new Terminal window:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install aptik

One thing I did notice, it does not run in sudo mode. 

Open Menu Editor Mint

So to fix that you can right mouse click on your Menu, left mouse click on Config, then left mouse on Open the menu editor.

Now in the left column select Administrator, in the middle column select the program Aptik, then in the right column select Properties

Open Menu Editor

Now you need to add gksu to the command so will run in Administrator mode. 

open menu editor

In the Command box put this command in: gksu aptik-launcher

After the mod to the launcher is completed, (in Mint) go to your menu and under Administrator you should see Aptik in the list. Click on it to run.

Put in your password and the program should come up. Make sure if you do a complete backup, it’s done on a flash drive or external hard drive. It will take up gigabytes of room…

Enjoy it..