Backup your installed packages with APTonCD

Gone are the days when you fear to do another clean install of your Linux drive just 'coz you'll lose all the installed software. I've just stumbled upon a software that you'll be looking for once you've broken the system and wanna do a clean install.

First on, some history. Every time I get my hands on Ubuntu CD and install it, I begin a series of tweaking around. This goes on until someday I break the system upto the state of no recovery. Then I give up and don't turn back to linux for some time (maybe even months). Every time I've managed to extend the time for which the system can be rescued (which shows I'm improving on rescuing side :-). But the fact that each time I've to download all those apps that I love haunts me. That lead to the search of some software which could backup all the packages and from which I could retrieve them. The answer to it is APTonCD

APTonCD is a tool with a graphical interface which allows you to create one or more CDs or DVDs (you choose the type of media) with all of the packages you've downloaded via APT-GET or APTITUDE, creating a removable repository that you can use on other computers.
APTonCD will also allow you to automatically create media with all of your .deb packages located in one specific repository, so that you can install them into your computers without the need for an Internet connection.

Just awesome for someone with 1GB data limit for the net. The package in repository (the one available via synaptic) has some bug. It crashes while reading from repositories. A newer version is available at the following link
aptoncd 0.1.98-0ubuntu4 for Intrepid (doesn't work for Jaunty, link to newer working version is aptoncd_0.1-1_all.deb for Jaunty)

PS. I haven't tried reinstalling packages after backing up, but was able to successfully make a CD image containing backup of all my apps. Will update on how well it goes.

Update: The restoration process worked flawlessly. Took me some time to figure out how to make it work directly from the .iso image file. It should be loaded using aptoncd. Then the selected packages would be restored to the cache. So all you have to do is add select the 'add downloaded packages' option from synaptic and add the /var/cache/apt/archives/ folder. (That's where the apt-downloaded packages go before installation). If you burn it to a cd, you can restore the required softwares after adding the cdrom to repositories

For someone who loves keeping the desktop neat, here's mine: