quick & dirty - installation & backup

First of all, I don't do all that wimpy stuff about using a nano or gedit or what-not for editing my sources.list. I mean, that sounds responsible and orderly (and good boy scouts always follow the rules), but in the long run there are quicker ways. I gradually figure out what works, so my progress is slow but incremental at first; but after a few reinstallations, I get everything running as I want. So instead of discarding what I ought to have learned by trial and error, I save myself a lot of trouble in the long run by following these methods. I backup my sources.list like so: sudo cp -r -v -f /etc/apt/sources.list -t /media/<WHEREVER>/sources/jessie/sources.list-orig and change permissions so that I can edit my sources.list without being root. Then I open up sources.list-orig with whatever text editor (I prefer leafpad), making sure to save it as sources.list and not sources.list-orig. When I'm done, I copy it back to where it belongs like so: sudo cp -r -v -f /media/<WHEREVER>/sources/jessie/sources.list -t /etc/apt/ and run sudo apt-get update. After I have downloaded and installed pkgs, I take the precaution of saving them all to an external drive somewhere, and sort everything into folders (so that everything tde-trinity has its own folder): sudo mv -v -f /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb -t /media/<WHEREVER>/debian/jessie/tde-trinity/ and then I change permissions: sudo chmod -R 700 /media/<WHEREVER>/debian/jessie/tde-trinity/ | sudo chown -R <MYSELF> /media/<WHEREVER>/debian/jessie/tde-trinity/ | sudo chgrp -R <MYSELF> /media/<WHEREVER>/debian/jessie/tde-trinity/ (changing <WHEREVER> and <MYSELF>, of course, to whatever is appropriate for your situation. Then when I need to reinstall stuff, I have already sorted out what works for my system, so I just do: sudo dpkg -i -E -G /media/<WHEREVER>/debian/jessie/tde-trinity/*.deb and install everything Trinity and TDE in a couple minutes, rather than waiting literally days for stuff to download. And then I run sudo apt-get -f install to correct any missing dependencies. For me, this is much faster and more reliable. Every so often I run sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and then also move these packages into my folder on a separate drive. To reinstall my entire system as it is, by downloading packages from the repositories, would take at least a week. If I always waited for packages to download, this would be about the year 2060. Once I have figured out what works, I don't keep trying again and again to solve the same problems. I did try using aptoncd to create discs, but it seems that I need much more space in my root partition to use for temporary files; it worked nicely on older systems. And anyway, sooner or later I will upgrade to something else like Stretch, or switch to Devuan, or both, and then I won't need my old packages, so all I need to do is delete that folder, and change my commands to point to the appropriate places. I would be curious to know what are other people's methods. I've heard about some net installations already. Bill