Ubuntu – ny GUI application for command rsync

I would recommend you to use rsync instead, it will allow you to do a live system to system real synchronization without the need of temporary files. It also provides the benefit of doing incremental updates when you need to update the clone.

I would exclude only: /proc/ /sys /dev /tmp /mnt On the clone system you will need to make sure /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.cfg are updated with the UUIDs of the clone systems partitions.

If you have a database like mysql you will need to be carefull and stop the DB before performing the copy.

Pratik is not 100 % correct; Unison does have a nice GUI:

It can be helpful in getting you started.

However, it is also possible to run from the command line, which makes it easy to put in a cron job, so that you can schedule it to run every 15 minutes or whatever you want. You'll typically create a profile with a certain name, you can do this in the GUI, but then you can run that profile from the commandline like

unison -batch name_of_your_profile

This is useful since you can then make a cronjob out of it. Type crontab -e, then paste in the line

*/15 * * * *      /usr/bin/unison -batch name_of_your_profile   &> /tmp/unison-cron.log

and exit the editor. Your unison command will now run every 15 minutes, and output any errors to the file /tmp/unison-cron.log.

Actually, it seems like there's even a GUI for cron, Gnome Schedule(friendly intro to it here). Never tried it, but I guess it makes running Unison from cron even more user-friendly …

See also the Ubuntu wiki page on Unison.

Unison is quite powerful, I've used it for a long time to sync stuff between two laptops, a desktop and a remote server … It's quite good at ensuring you get the newest and correct content, and if there's a conflict it's easy to merge. It's not a backup tool, though; if you delete everything on one end, you'll find it deleted on the other end too ;-)