I'm upgrading to a new computer and I'd love to transfer my current Arch Linux setup from my old machine to the new one. Ideally, I want to bring over all my installed packages, applications, and even the saved files from the old system. What's the best way to do this?
3 Answers
You could use Clonezilla. It’s really user-friendly and fast for this purpose. It handles imaging nicely and takes care of different hardware setups too.
I usually opt for Clonezilla as well and back up my system image to my NAS, which is really network-friendly. You could also save it to a USB drive. Just keep in mind that if you switch to a computer with different hardware, you might need to adjust some settings post-transfer. I've done this multiple times without any major issues.
You can use the `dd` command to create a bit-for-bit copy of your partition. The command would be `dd if=/device/partition of=/your/backup/disk.img bs=8M status=progress`. Just be aware that this will also copy any empty data, which might not be necessary. You might want to look into that if your disk is big!
That’s super helpful, thanks! Might stick with the image format then.
.img files are more versatile than .iso for general backups.