HI, been using Linux for many years now in various guises, but not as a technical user!
I keep coming back to Ubuntu and having installed the latest version on my laptop and tweaked it the way I want it, I was wondering if there was a simple way to transfer this to another machine, without starting again from scratch
Grateful for your advice
Cheers
R
Looked at Clonezilla?
Hey thanks for quick feedback. much appreciated
Had a look and am a bit wary about the partitioninig stuff as I will be installing alongside Windows and over writing a previous distro
Cheers
R
Yeah, that could be tricky, manual, and requiring some expert knowledge.
I have a vague recollection of some Windows software that can do this, but I haven’t done that for a long while, so wouldn’t be confident recommending something.
I guess it depends how much “tweaking” you’ve done, as to whether it’s worth doing, or if you should just start a clean install, and manually copy stuff over. You may be able to get away with just getting a list of things you’ve installed, and install those things on the new machine. Then copy your home directory only, which will have settings, data and so-on.
I have long thought there should be a “Migration Assistant” application to do this, but it’s not super straightforward to write, and has the potential for data loss 
Thanks
On reflection I will do a clean install but seeing it is going on a PC in the lounge and will be accessed by family, I think I will try Edubuntu
Cheers
R
Gparted in a “Try Ubuntu” live session has a function to copy (i.e. clone) partitions from one device to another.
Can you physically remove either your source disk or target disk and pop it into the other PC (or use a caddy)?
In effect, you’ll need both disks accessible to efficiently use this Gparted function.
It could be done by copying the source to an external device and then re-copying to the target.
This would introduce more chance of failure and, depending on the partition sizes, more time to perform the task.
Using Gparted, I successfully cloned an Ubuntu 24.04 OS to dual boot with Windows 11.
Windows 11 was already on the disk using 4 partitions.
I used Window tools to create free space and to reposition partition 4 (something to do with Windows recovery)
I cloned 3 Ubuntu partitons (ESP, System root and separate /home) to new partitions 5,6 and 7.
These three partitions were approx 90GB in total.
Yes, I have two ESPs on one disk and so far, no problem.
Boot either OS via Grub or via the PC boot menu.
I only did this for fun because I had the spare disk capacity. I was a bit bored and it was pouring with rain. It didn’t matter to me if it failed but it didn’t.
You’ll most likely have issue with different hardware. You could copy over your User info without issue.
If using Windows & Ubuntu, you should have good backups of both systems. But with Ubuntu, you really only need /home where all your user settings are, maybe /etc if you changed system settings (I change grub, but copy changes into /home for backup) and a list of installed apps to make it easy to reinstall the apps you added. Setting for all apps are in /home. If you have separate data partition(s), you meed those also. This can be a good test that your backups are complete, as you can do new install, restore from backup. If anything is missing you still have old system to get more info.
How about QT-Fsarchiver? That will do exactly as you want. Clonezilla will too, but it is very easy to cock it up if you don’t know what you are doing.
QT-Fsarchiver can create a bootable image that can be transferred to a different machine easily.
I have been using it for over 10 years and it has never let me down.
Cheers Tony.
Thanks for that tip re the home folder. WIll bear that in mind for future
Thanks have taken note and will look into that for next time.
+1 for fsarchiver (cli) or qt-fsarchiver (GUI). I have used it to migrate my installations many times. A big advantage over clonzilla is that you can restore the image to any hard drive large enough to hold the contents while clonezilla requires the target drive to be at least as big as the one you clone. So say you have 1 TB but only 600 G is used, fsarchiver copies only the 600G and you could restore the image to any hd >= 600G but with clonezilla the target drive would have to be at least 1 TB.
fsarchiver allows live cloning, you can use your computer while it is cloning in the background so you don’t need to shut down your computer like clonzilla (no installation or removal of packages while doing that)
qt-fsarchiver has a very simple interface, it is very easy to use while fsarchiver is more flexible as it has more options not available in the GUI, e.g to exclude files and folders.