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Wondering if installation transfers is possible. (self.linux)

submitted 3 days ago by Lost_My_Mind to c/linux

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So on android in 2010 I used to be into the idea of rooting my phone, and installing custom roms.

Distros are essentially custom roms for your pc. Same concept.

There was a program called TWRP that I could use. Back then it would make a full backup of EVERYTHING on your internal drive. It was mostly used after you already had a custom rom.

But it backedup EVERYTHING. If you wrote a txt message as a draft, and didn't sent it, then backed up with TWRP, whenever you restored on a new phone, that txt draft was there too. It was literally like your phone took an all encompassing picture of everything on your phones internal drive, every single file and setting, and made a backup. Saving it to your sd card.

So I'm thinking, linux should theoretically be able to do this. Maybe it does.

What if my current install is on a 250gb drive, and I buy a completely different 4TB drive? What if I want to do this total backup, save the backup to a usb hard drive, then put in a NEW hard drive, and have it restore the backup so now my entire old hard drive is now on my new hard drive? And every setting, every file, every last detail is an exact replica.

Could I do that?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yes and no. Android has separate OS and data partitions. On Linux, this is configurable; in most installer defaults, root and home partitions are not separated. But it's trivial to do after the fact, if you have some unpartitioned space or can shrink your root partition.

However, unless you're using flatpaks or something, it's not guaranteed that installed programs containerize their data in the same way as Android apps.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I mean this doesn't really matter for the use case... The only difference is you'd need to tick two boxes to clone both partitions, or just one, if it's one. And if you just dd everything onto a bigger disk, you don't even need to worry about anything. Just clone the whole storage and it'll be the exact same (cloned) partition layout, whatever it is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Oh, I misread the post. I thought they were talking about installing a new ROM and keeping the data partition. Yes, moving everything is trivial (if to an equal or larger disk).