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?
I Always use dd for this kind of thing. Others have mentioned some other tools but I have never had any problems with it that I didn’t cause myself.
Oh, me causing the issue myself is a HUGE risk. I’m an idiot when it comes to linux. I would be very happy if there were a thing in linux called “guardrail”. And all guardrail would do is stop you from doing the stupid things. Like “ah, you’re attempting to fuck up. Are you SURE you want to fuck up?” And I’d be like “uhhhhhhh, imma click no for now…”
Then later I findout I would have erased my hard drive without guardrail, or somehow launch nukes at Canada.
What I’m trying to say is that I should still be on training wheels, but linux is all too happy to let you fall on your face.
But dd? No idea what that is. My instinct says “disc drive”, but I could be wrong. I’m probably wrong.
You could use the GUI
Read through this scroll a little to find your use case, it’s in there. I’m sorry if being suggested to read seems rude or uninviting or something but I really think for this it’d be faster for you to do so. These people’s articles have always helped me and I’ve been using Linux for 20 years. dd stands for data duplicator and I just had to look that up lol.
No guardrails but you have a second to reconsider when typing your password. The other day I used some gui util as sudo and deleted my /bin folder somehow. I would have noticed that in the cli.