Came across this fantastic utility that is completely FOSS. Intent was to upgrade my smaller SSD to 1TB. Stumbled upon foxclone.com<p>Experts from the site :<p>"FoxClone is a Linux based image backup, restore and clone tool using a simple point and click interface. Booted from its' own linux system, it takes images of the partitions on your hard disk (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) and stores them for later restoration. Image files can optionally be compressed to save space."<p>The software worked blazingly fast as SSD's were employed at both ends that too without a single error!
I booted from the new SSD and was blown away with the ease of overall process.<p>The creator of the software has declined my request to reimburse in any way possible. Hence I'm sharing it with HN for all Linux users.
I haven't reinstalled Linux in years; usually, if I want to migrate my install somewhere else I use one of the following approaches:<p>- `rsync -qaHAXS src dest`
- `btrfs/zfs send/recv`<p>Lately I standardized around ZFS, so I've moved several times my install using send and receive (even using SSH) and it's beautiful.
I'm not sure I'd ever want to replicate or clone my Linux install, including all hardware-related settings and all those applications that I installed at some point via apt and used only once or twice.<p>What I do need to replicate from time to time (whenever I deal with multiple machines) are 1) my data and 2) my settings / dotfiles. For the former, I use Syncthing (and of, course, backups because syncing can easily go wrong). As for the latter, I've been curating my dotfiles for ten years now and over time added various install scripts, which not only put the dotfiles in the right place but also install and set up the software they are for. One install script e.g. installs zsh, sets it as my default shell and creates a symlink from `~/.zshrc` to my zsh config. Basically, whenever I set up a new machine, I just need to run those scripts and I'm good to go within a few minutes.
Here is a link for the documentation - <a href="http://foxclone.com/download/foxcloneV12.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://foxclone.com/download/foxcloneV12.pdf</a>