Saving and Reloading Your Debian/Ubuntu Package Llist

You can backup a list of all your installed packages on Ubuntu or Debian like this:

dpkg −−get−selections > list_of_installed_files

and then restore them like this:

cat list_of_installed_files > dpkg --set-selections && sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

Note that this may require some work afterwards or during if you are going between different versions of the distro.