Cloning - anyone tried it yet?

I have recently used REDO to create, as I see it, a clone (.ISO?) of my laptop's Zorin 12 Ultimate operating system - including all the additional programmes and settings that I have added over the last eight months and all my data that I have installed in that time. Size wise, it must be ~ 170 GB or so.

As I understand it, REDO creates as .ISO with the laptop HDD unmounted - so all the file system works correctly when the .ISO is copied back to the original HDD (or any HDD that you wish to be a clone of the original).

Again, as I understand, it it is very difficult to impossible without professional software to create a self installing version of this .ISO (not really sure why - I got my original Zorin 12 Ultimate installation as a 4.1 GB .ISO which I burned to a DVD - so size could be an issue).

So, what are the chances that I could use this .ISO, using my laptop's backup drive and REDO, on a DVD, to clone my Z12 set up onto a brand new Mesh desktop PC - if I got one with no OS installed and with UEFI and safe start disabled?

Would my .ISO be able to cope with the (presumably) slightly different hardware than what my laptop has? Could I use a larger HDD - 1 TB, say, as against my laptop's 500 GB? Would a SSD speed things up (or get in the way) and what size would it have to be?

Sounds intriguing!

Would my .ISO be able to cope with the (presumably) slightly different hardware than what my laptop has?

Probably. Depending on the hw. F.e i've had this install on i3 and hd, i5 and ssd and now on m.2 @ x99 i7 with no problems, on that time i've also switched from amd to nvidia and in the middle i used intel as igpu too when one of my nvidia's broke.

I used clonezilla to make a clone of my disk and everything worked out perfectly when restoring.

I make 'disk image' using "Disks" (gnome disk utility) and restore them OK. Usually back onto the same hardware but have restored onto different hardware also. This method requires the restore/target drive to be same or larger size than the original/image. The image (*.img) file will be same size as the drive it came from, 500GB HDD will make a 500GB .img file. A video showing this method is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYpHPe3VAOo
Usually any image I've created (Linux not Windows) works on my other hardware OK.

Also used dd command and various other software utilities.
As far as restoring a non UEFI install onto a UEFI enabled machine, not sure but think it would likely work, you could also try putting the old drive in the new machine and see how that goes!
I recently moved my Windows 10 UEFI system from a 64GB SSD to 120GB SSD, this was dual boot with Linux Mint on another SSD drive, 'Disks' actually failed, think I used dd command in the end.

I would guess if you intend to continue using the original/same machine and the clone on the same network that changing the machine name would be necessary?

SSD will definitely speed system up, my old test machine with HDD about 1 minute to boot up, SSD 20 seconds. Size would depend on how big the source image is, so if yours is around 170GB you would likely need a 240GB SSD or what ever size above 170GB!


As I like to tinker with these things I have a USB to SATA converter cable and an mSATA to SATA converter card to allow plugging various drives into different machines and for imaging purposes, you can find this sort of thing on ebay for around $5, very handy at times.

The name eludes me ATM but have seen software on Linux Distro's that creates a .iso of your system, so guessing you configure up the system as you like it then make an installable .iso file, sort of FinstonPickleLinux...Think it was on Pearl Linux or Makulu Linux.

Redo is for backing up the system you installed the OS on not for cloning. If you want to clone your drive then you need to use something like Clonezilla but no guarantees as I have never tried cloning a notebook drive to a desktop.

I have made images of all my systems using Clonezilla. but I've never tried restoring one yet! I trust it will work. Clonezilla has a good rep.

Thanks, MBMz10, a little Internet research revealed that Pearl Linux can make an installable .iso file using PinguyBuilder (Pearl LinuxMATE 5.0) or Relinux and Remastersys (Pearl Linux 4.0), I think.

So:

A. It seems as though PinguyBuilder will work with most Distros on Ubuntu16.04, so it could be a way forward, if I run it on Zorin 12 Ultimate.

B. Alternatively, I guess I could run a live DVD version of Pearl Linux 5.0 and use PinguyBuilder to create an installable .iso of my Zorin 12 Ultimate set up on a back up drive - the Finston Pickle distro!

Is A. or B. really possible? What about a PinguyBuilder .iso not being bigger than 4.2GB - my file structure is ~160 GB?

How do you install to, say, a new Mesh PC from a usb attached drive - set Bios to boot from usb - or do you copy (Clone) the .iso to the HDD using a live OS and let boot keep to its normal start pattern? How do you rename the clone so the network isn't confused?


Questions, questions and no clear explanation that I have found yet on the Internet.

Hi, PinguyBuilder, yes that was the app I was referring to, never used it myself so cant really help you with that. I looked here https://www.ostechnix.com/pinguy-builde ... ubuntu-os/ and would seem size could be an issue, but it does have a backup option so maybe that would work?
So to answer your A. and B. above, I dont know.

You could try my method above using Disks to 'restore' onto a spare drive and connect that drive into the new PC.

As Linux can usually be installed in 5-20 minutes it is not the time to install the OS but rather setting everything else up, many hours in some cases. I backup things like Firefox favorites, Cairo Dock profile settings, Compiz settings and user data then restore them after installing a fresh OS so could have a new PC up and usable for my own preferences in around an hour as an example

I dont know what a Mesh PC is, thought it was a typo at first so I googled it and best I could find is a device for extending WiFi.
If this is some sort of 'central' or 'server' type PC then I would use a fresh install on it myself!
What exactly are you wanting to achieve? Setup a new desktop PC without going through all the configuring you have acquired over the last 8 months?

In Zorin 4 Remastersys had a GUI - now it is all by command line which I find to complex to learn at my time of life! I created an iso with all my data and OS using Remastersys with GUI in Zorin 4 on an old Dell Notebook and it worked perfectly. Sorry can't be of more help.

Yes, MBMz10, I wish to setup a new desktop PC without going through all the configuring I have acquired over the last 8 months.

Mesh is mid range, UK supplier of Windows desktop PCs (~£500).

Just wanted to report that I successfully restored an image of Ubuntu Mate 16.04 using Clonezilla. I had upgraded UM to 17.04, but had a problem with the internet, so I went back to 16.06. Clonezilla did it in about 7 minutes, to the same partition. It is indeed a beast, but can be tamed with some effort. It can do any OS, so it's good to have around.

Just wanted to report that I successfully restored an image of Ubuntu Mate 16.04 using Clonezilla. I had upgraded UM to 17.04, but had a problem with the internet, so I went back to 16.06. Clonezilla did it in about 7 minutes, to the same partition. It is indeed a beast, but can be tamed with some effort. It can do any OS, so it's good to have around.

One thing you ALWAYS have to remember when using Clonezilla is to include the mbr (in this case, GRUB).

Yeah, I saw that in one of their warnings (which are so frightening it's a wonder I went ahead with the whole thing). I didn't do anything special, it worked out though. And I always have the Boot Repair disc to install grub if things fail. I'm definitely not a Clonezilla master by any stretch. Hopefully I'll get better with time. I'll have to get their latest version, I believe it just came out recently. Maybe they've made things a bit clearer.

Redo is an awful lot simpler.

No doubt Redo is simpler, but does it work with any OS? Also, my only experience with it was unsuccessful. not sure why; most likely the fault was mine. Maybe my version is too old? I'll look in to it again.

The project is dead but I recently used it to backup my Windows 7 install after rebuilding from scratch (my fault for forcing a shut-down when running out of time!). I'm going to backup a rebuilt laptop with the rubbish removed in due course at work - will test it out.

OK, unlike Acronis, Redo does not have the ability to shrink an image to fit to a smaller hard drive (unlike Acronis which can do proportional cloning - I think?). Image had to be on drive of similar or larger size!

I've successfully used REDO to create an image of my system - but not tried to restore it yet!

I have also used Backups and a separate external drive drive to record my data in /home.

I can not really see why this REDO info could not be used to create a "Clone" system - perhaps someone could explain why it would fail.

Surely any duplicated info could be retrospectively changed on the "Clone" machine to make it freestanding. Also, I have seen the ability to install a "Clean" grub when reinstalling the O/S - could this not be done with a working (Cloned) O/S?

I just tried Clonezilla, little confusing at first however managed to make some images, yet to try restoring one. Space saving as one partition was 55GB and the image file is only about 22GB another, my fresh Zorin Lite 12.2 was 60GB down to about 5GB and faster than what I had been doing.

Downloading Redo now and about to test it. From what I can gather from the website it looks like it can "Clone" your system as well as being able to 'browse' the image for files which would be handy feature. I have used Norton Ghost in the past with Windows and still have some old disks around but think it might have issues with Linux files systems or such.