this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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As you seem to know a lot about Clonezilla, I’m allowing myself to ask you something.
Would Clonezilla work for doing a backup and reinstalling it on a completely different device?
I’ve already used it to backup and restore on the same device. I also tried to install my Surface Go device backup on an old Acer Computer but it failed to boot afterwards. I’m not sure if it’s because of the surface specific kernel or because it doesn’t work from one computer to another.
Would you know that?
I don't know off the top of my head. I think that Clonezilla can modify images in such a way as they can be booted on a different type of device. My knowledge of the black magic of boot sectors and partition stuff is lacking. Also, you'd have to make sure the motherboard/BIOS is properly configured for reading the device in the same way that the original device was read. UEFI/BIOS stuff can be a pain in the ass to get right.
So my short answer is probably, but I wouldn't be able to walk you through something like that. Wish I could be more helpful.
Okay thanks for the answer 🙏
Yes it can, but it’s up to your BIOS to be able to boot it. UEFI might work better, you still might need to manually add the boot entry to the efivars using efibootmgr. Many distributions also have documentation for a rescue boot and reinstalling the bootloader config.
In general, no, this won't work. In your case, you're lucky since at least the Surface Go is using an x86 CPU, so it's not completely out of the question, but transferring the image as-is to a completely different device typically does not work without modification.
Simple example: your target device might not refer to existing hardware (let's say a storage medium) in the same manner as your old device, so the existing references in your cloned image won't work. There are other issues of course, e. g. missing drivers for different hardware present on the target device.
It's possible to modify the image so it would boot, but given the Surface runs Windows, that's going to be a chore. I'd consider this an interesting project if bored on a slow weekend, but I'd most likely just do a filesystem backup of relevant data and call it a day.
I forgot to say that I’m using Linux (Fedora 40). If you think it wouldn’t work, do you know another program which would?
My data is stored on the cloud, but I wouldn’t want to go through the hassle of setting everything up again if I move to another computer (extensions, mail, calendar, installed programs and settings).
Oh, that makes everything a lot easier. The majority of the relevant settings will be in your home folder then, i. e. in the ${HOME}./.config folder, while some might also be in ${HOME}/.local/share etc.
You probably want to backup the whole home folder anyway, so that would pickup most of your settings. In order to make that work on a different system, you would have to install all applications you were using on the tablet as well. Luckily, software installation in Linux is pretty easy, so you can export a list of installed applications from the Surface and then re-install them on your target system before migrating your home folder. The software list should become part of your backup. See e. g. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/82880/how-to-replicate-installed-package-selection-from-one-fedora-instance-to-another for an idea of how to perform this.
I have used this approach in the past and it will get you 95% there. There might be some global system settings that you'd like to also transfer to your new system, but you can add those as you discover you miss them on the target system.
Okay then I guess I'll just backup my home folder on kDrive (my cloud service) and then just remember which programs are installed since the automatic listing of programs seems a bit too complicated for me. Thanks for the help!