Hi everyone!
I now have 4 computers running Linux, each with an almost perfectly set up distro (which took days to perfect) and would want to create backups so that I can move and restore these between all of my computers.
Here is a list of my computers:
Surface Go 1 128gb SSD 8gb of Ram running Fedora Silverblue
MacBook Pro 2012 (upgraded with 512gb SSD and 16gb of Ram) running Pop!_OS
NUC7i3DNB 128gb SSD 8gb of Ram running LibreELEC
Steam Deck LCD 256 SSD 16gb of Ram running Steam OS
I was planning on using Clonezilla to create backups of these, store them somewhere (kDrive and external hard drive) and be able to restore these between each of these (and my future) computers if needed.
I’ve succesfully used Clonezilla in the past, but I’ve also encountered a dead end issue when trying to restore my Surface Go 1 backup on an old Acer (probably 5737Z) I had lying around. I don’t remember what the problem was, but something related to UEFI and EFI legacy stuff I think…
So, as all these computers are quite different and not all of them so Linux friendly, I wanted to know if you think I’ll encounter issues when trying to move installs between them or not.
In order to save space, I’d probably shrink every partition so that it’s the same size as the data it contains and then extend it again once restored on another computer.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Consider your perfect settings as the part you want to keep (as well as all your documents etc, of course), but the OS will change.
Tomorrow you’ll do an update and 2 applications and 10 libraries are now newer… so you probably don’t want to store a “golden image” for too long without redoing it to consider all the updates.
Now… with that situation in mind, it’s generally easier to just do a clean install of the distro and reapply your settings.
So, depending on what you’ve setup, installed, tweaked & configured, saving that can be done with config files in
/etcand/homeand maybe a 1-liner for applications to install.That will be smaller and more easily reproducable on all your hardware (and maybe some VMs)
How you do that depends on what you’ve changed and your skills… maybe bash, maybe ansible, maybe just copying files - whatever makes sense to you.
I’ve done Ansible professionally for 3 years, now. I’ve used puppet, chef/cinc, I’ve played with mgmtconfig, and I’ve built entire ecosystems out of cron+make+rpm since 2002, 6 years before ‘devops’ had a name.
Don’t use Ansible. EVERYTHING ELSE is better. Please consider any option before it. Strongly consider mgmtconfig.