Hi there,
I would like to be able to essentially dupe my running system to a disk image for archival and experimental purposes, and I was wondering if there was a way to do it.
It is simple, but you need enough free space on the target position. With the installer you can install the complete system to another harddiskm or you make a image file and format them to bfs and mount it with double click, then install to this one.
https://besly.de/index.php/backup/backup-of-the-complete-system
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idk about an iso or why you’d need one unless you had a really old machine — but you could create a blank disk image using dd and because I don’t know of a CLI frontend to DriveSetup like diskutil on the Mac, I’d suggest using parted on anything that can run it to create a partition table (sorry if Haiku does have this and I don’t know of it!) From there, create a FAT32 filesystem and bring it back to Haiku and mount it. Now in DriveSetup, reformat the partition you made earlier as BeFS and mark it bootable. If you need EFI support, create an ESP ahead of it as FAT32 and make sure the virtual disk uses GPT (the GUID table instead of Intel). Copy the system and whatever you want to be persistent into the new image. You should then be able to write it to a disk and boot it on any laptop since at least 2012 with Secure Boot off, hope this helps!
@apgreimann: look at my tutorial 
You can mount every supported image format with a double click (like ISO, BFS…) .
Format the image to BFS and copy all you want to it. Aware that parts of the system are virtual and not physical.
You can store your private data and settings from home (and folders behind it) and non-packaged folders. To store the hpkg files only make sence if you want to backup an old version, but if you run the hpkg file, the system will every time install the current version of the dependencies.
If you want to backup files on non bfs images you can use my backup tool LBackup from https://software.besly.de, here all files are stored in zip files and can be expanden to reinstall.
I was eventually able to figure it out. And it could not have been simpler, but I was perhaps getting ahead of myself and forgot to read simple screen instructions.
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