Clone – How to Clone Ubuntu to Another PC

clone

I searched here and see mention of Clonezilla and Remastersys – but nothing I found answered my question completely, so I ask:

My home PC is just a generic one, and now that I changed it to Ubuntu I really love how it's come out and how it runs better !

My office PC is a different generic set of hardware, and I'd like to 'clone' the exact same setup to it but not have to repeat all the tweaking and such that I did already.

Is there a program that will allow me to replicate/install my already customized setup from one to the other, easily ?
Are there certain steps I must make before doing something like that so it'll be compatible with different hardware ?

Thanks !

Best Answer

You can't be sure 100% that they'll work since it's different hardware, but here comes the interesting part Ubuntu will load the correct Modules for the hardware its running so the only thing you can do is just, try it and see if it works, now the configuration files are in your home folder under several hidden folders (.config for example).

A personal experience on this: I had a Core2Duo, MSi Intel motherboard and an AMD GPU running Ubuntu 11.04, when the time arrived I upgraded to an AMD PII x6, AMD Mb and the AMD GPU, luckily Ubuntu worked for me so, as i said.. try it.

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Ubuntu – Script/tool to clone a ubuntu server

If two systems have the same packages installed, and you make a diff of their /etc directories, you will basically get all the configuration changes between them (maybe not 100% of them but still very accurate). So, what I did to audit my system was this:

Install a minimal system with debootstrap (similar to what is described here: http://dashohoxha.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-to-set-up-chroot-environment-for.html).
Make sure that I install on the chroot system all the packages that are installed on the main system (as described here: http://www.debianadmin.com/clone-your-ubuntu-installation.html)
Make a diff between the /etc dirs of both systems.

Of course, this diff cannot be readily used to install and configure another system, but knowing where are the differences and what they are, can help to build a tklpatch (like this: https://github.com/dashohoxha/B-Translator/tree/master/tklpatch), which of course is not quite easy to be done and requires some work.

Then, I can distribute/publish this tklpatch and everybody can build easily a system quite similar to mine.

Backup – Cloning with DD Command: A Complete Guide

Unless /dev/sdb3 is actually mounted on /dev/sdb3 ( I doubt it, please research a bit on devices and mount points), you'd need to:

Find out where /dev/sdb3 is mounted. Use the mount command for this. Assume that /dev/sdb3 is mounted in /home.

Point your file writing to that place:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda6 of=/home/backup.img

Once done, verify the img file contains what you expect.

Also, is there any need to back up the entire partition? I usually find it easier and more useful to back up files using rsync or something similar, then if needed compressing the resulting backup directory. But this is really up to you.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Script/tool to clone a ubuntu server

Backup – Cloning with DD Command: A Complete Guide

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