On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 12:23 AM, Jonathan Vasquez <jvasquez1011@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hello everyone, > > So for the past few days I've been playing with Gentoo and Funtoo. > I've learned a lot. I learned about something called Stage 4 and 5, > which you can basically do to your system in order to make a backup > copy of it, and put it in a tarball. I don't see any Wiki pages for > this, so I was thinking that maybe I can write one once I learn more > about it. Anyone think this is necessary? If you mean it as a way to backup your system, sure, why not. There have been some ideas on the forum about creating a tar "install package" that you just untar to have a working Arch, but I've never seen a working example. You can move your packages to the new computer in order to avoid redownloading them. but backing them up is generally not necessary.