# Alpine Linux LBU

> Alpine can commit changes back onto its own live ISO. Using LBU to build a persistent maintenance drive.

- URL: https://seanbehan.ca/posts/alpine-lbu
- Author: Sean Behan
- Published: December 4, 2020
- Tags: alpine, linux
- Reading time: 2 minutes

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### What is LBU?

Alpine Linux has a cool feature called LBU that lets you create a backup on top

of the Live ISO. These backups are called local backups.

I plan on using LBU as a system maintenance drive. It allows you to save

changes you make to the Live ISO and restore them automatically when you boot

the next time.

### Setup and Committing

To set up LBU I booted the Alpine Linux ISO, ran `setup-alpine`, mounted my

drive to `/media/alpine_usb` and when I got to the disk selection I selected no

disk, and `alpine_usb` as where to store the configs, and the default for

cache.

Now when I make changes in the Alpine Linux Live ISO I can commit them.

To see what is being committed I first check `lbu status` which lists all the

files being added or removed, then `lbu commit` to commit the changes.

When I was rebooting I had an issue where the drive would automount itself to

/media/sdb and then wouldn't work with lbu when I wanted to commit or check the

status because it was already mounted. To fix this I just had to `umount

/dev/sdb` on boot and then lbu worked as expected.

### Caching and Configuration

To use cache you have to mount it to `/media/alpine_usb` so that it can write

the cache files when you're installing packages. I want this because it makes

reinstalling my packages on reboot a lot faster, they can just be loaded from

cache instead of from online repositories.

Upon reboot I had to reinstall all the packages I had installed using `apk

upgrade` but since the cache is there it just installs everything really

quickly.

I uncommented and changed the number of backups in `/etc/lbu/lbu.conf` to 20 so

that I would be able to revert up to 20 commits in case I broke my configs.

I see Alpine LBU as a good way to keep a backup of changes to the ISO so it

could be used as a system recovery disk with the tools that are needed.