If I’m already in a Linux, ideally a Debian-esque Linux, is there a way for me to say “turn this new external hard drive into a bootable Linux that’s functionally identical to this current machine”? One that doesn’t involve any of dd, downloading an ISO or rebooting? It’s hard to believe this is as difficult as it seems, or that this isn’t a standard tool yet, but if it is I sure can’t find it.
Every installer I’ve seen since the first time I tried the once-magical Knoppix has let you boot into a workable Linux on its own and install that Linux to the hard drive if you like, but I can’t a standalone tool that does the same from a running system.
What I’m after is a tool (I briefly wrote “ideally graphical”, but yeah. Let’s be real here.) that you point at a hard drive, that:
- Formats this new hard drive in some rough approximation of what you’ve already got and making it bootable. (grub-whatever?)
- Installs the same packages onto that drive as are on the host system, and
- Optionally copies over account information required, /home/*, passwords, whatever else is in /etc or /opt; skip (or be smart about?) stuff like the hostname or iptables, maybe.
…and ends with a hard drive I can plug into another system, boot and log into as comfortably-preconfigured me.
debootstrap almost gets part of the way there, and you can sort of convince that or multistrap to do the job if you scrape out your current config, pour it into a config file and rsync over a bunch of other stuff. But then I’m back in roll-it-yourself-land where I started.
Ideally this apparently-hypothetical magic clone tool would be able to do this with minimal network traffic, too – it’s likely I’ve already got many or most of those packages cached, no? And alternatively, it’d also be nice to able to keep my setup largely intact while migrating across architectures.
I go looking for this every few years, even though it puts me briefly back on the “why would you ever do it like that? You should switch distros!” You Asked A Linux Question On The Internet Treadmill. But I haven’t found a decent answer yet beyond rolling my own.
Welp.
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