How do I create a .iso file of my personal Linux Lite system

[smhardesty]

But isn't an external or 2nd drive a necessity for any backup system? Backup to main drive =  loss of backup if drive catastrophically fails.

An external drive is definitely not a requirement to backup. A second drive is probably recommended, but in the case of this laptop I have only one physical drive. It's partitioned with an 8GB SWAP, a 25GB partition as / for the system, a 500GB partition as /home, then the remainder of the 1TB is mounted under /media. I create a space on the /media partition to save restore points to. Actually, on my wife's laptop I don't even have a /media drive. It's just SWAP, / (root), and /home. I created a directory on her /home partition to save the restore points to. Systemback, or any of the good backup type software will save the system files and all your personal files in the /home directory. Now, as to how secure that type of backup system is will be hotly debated. Yes, if you save your backups or restore points to the same physical drive the system is installed on, you do run the risk of losing everything if the drive does a complete crash and burn.

On my desktop PC I have 4 physical drives and 2 optical drives. It's a leftover server I took in on trade right before I retired. I put a different MoBo in it and made some other changes, but the big case with all the bays and all the cooling fans on it was too irresistible. I turned it into my desktop for the office. On that machine I do save backups and create restore points on a different drive, then I copy all that drive to a second drive.

I have a couple of 128GB SD cards and a 256GB SD card. I will occasionally copy the contents of my laptop's /home directory onto one or more of those cards and then just dump it onto the big desktop PC. I had noticed some suspicious network activity not long after we moved into this house so I locked the whole network down and don't share any files or directories between any of my PCs. I lived in the country for nearly my entire life including the last 28 or 29 years before we retired to town so never had any worries with anybody attacking my network. Living in town is a whole different story. I still can't believe the number of open networks I can see. I just now checked and 3 of the open ones are available right now. Silly people.