Clone Fedora 42 Install

Ask Fedora
1

Hi all,

I have been using fedora 42 on my main PC for a good few months now. I have fully customized it with hyprland and various other applications.

I want to create a carbon copy of my fedora install onto my laptop so that I can use it on the go without having to re-configure everything. I’ve done some research into creating a custom iso using kickstart but it’s completely lost me.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

2

I would recommend Clonezilla as the least amount of work to accomplish this. You can find the project here: https://clonezilla.org. You’ll need a USB disk or SSH server to save the disk image to for restoration on the laptop.

Please note that Clonezilla works best if the storage devices (source, destination) are the same size.

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3

An extremely reliable tool for archiviing/restoring a partition is fsarchiver. I’ve been using it to backup/restore or migrate Fedora 30 - 42. There were some changes in the Spring of 2023 that caused the version available in the current repository to fail. There is an updated version:

Fsarchiver 0.8.8 bundled with SystemRescue 12.00 can flawlessly create/restore a compressed and encrypted archive of an ext4 data or OS filesystem

  1. Archive source UEFI boot and OS partitions separately to USB connected media. A single OS partition is assumed in these instructions
  2. Use gparted from a bootable distro to create a FAT16 partition with a size of approximately 92 MB on your laptop. For at least the last half dozen Fedora releases the UEFI partition actually contains less than 50 MB
  3. Use gparted to create an OS partition of reasonable size on your laptop while optionally leaving room to create a data partition in the future
  4. Restore the archived UEFI boot partition to the FAT16 partition on your laptop
  5. Restore the archived OS partition to the OS partition on your laptop
  6. Modify file /etc/fstab changing the signature (also referred to as the UUID) to match the signature of the FAT16 partition
  7. The previous step will be required if the UEFI partition gets formatted. Fsarchiver formats a target partition prior to restoring data to it.
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4

Given it’s a one off I would using the installed for the edition of Fedora you are using.
Then install any apps that you need. You can get a list of installed RPMs with

rpm -qa | sort >my-installed-rpms

then diff the list on the new system vs. the original system.

If you edited files in /etc duplicate thoses edits.

And finally copy your /home from the original to the new system.
Your /home will contain all the customisations you have made.

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5

Maybe not 100% what you are looking for but still - sesivany/linux-desktop-migration-tool: Linux Desktop Migration Tool aims to make migration from one Linux desktop machine to another as easy as possible. - Codeberg.org

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This is what your laptop might resemble if you choose to migrate one copy of Fedora to the same SSD. There only a handful of changes required to get a migrated copy working.

Fedora 40 migrated multiple times
Fedora 40 migrated multiple times775×532 65.8 KB

I usually maintain multiple installs for disaster recovery purposes:

  1. I have lost power. It is possible to get file corruption when this happens
  2. I have installed something and regretted it later. Removing all traces following an uninstall can be a non-trivial task
  3. I have deleted/overwritten something that I should have left alone

You have been presented with many options from several posters. It is your job to evaluate them and follow the guidance that you believe will yield the most desirable results

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