Every time I have to recover my old 8.1 system from backup, I have to go back out to the web and pull down a large number of updates. Recently, I trashed it when I was trying to create a disaster recovery backup so I could move up to the latest SuSE version. There are over 60 package updates out there that I now have to pull down, mostly security related. Some time over the past 2 /12 years, there were two YOU package updates. It seems like lots of things (maybe everything) that were patched after those updates are not recoverable from a YAST backup (at least I think that's the cause of this). I'm wondering if there's a way to backup ALL of my packages separately so that I can recover them from that backup after I recover my system itself. That would sure save me a lot of time and effort in my recovery process. I may very well trash this thing again before I get this disaster recovery process in place and I will want to test that recovery before I move on to a later version, so I could very well trash it then. I looked into some of the RPM commands, but didn't find one to back up packages. I would think there would be a way to do that built right into RPM (but maybe I'm wrong). Packages SEEM to be spread out through multiple directories instead of all being in one single location (isn't that true?). If (when) I hose myself again, I would like for the recovery to be a little less painful. Any help appreciated. Greg Wallace