It is possible to do a successful file system migration by using rsync as described in this article and updating the fstab and bootloader as described in Migrate installation to new hardware. This essentially provides a way to convert any root file system to another one.

rsync provides a way to do a copy of all data in a file system while preserving as much information as possible, including the file system metadata. It is a procedure of data cloning on a file system level where source and destination file systems do not need to be of the same type. It can be used for backing up, file system migration or data recovery.

I am familiar with using rsync to back up various files from my system but what is the best way to completely restore a machine.

I run the script daily, early every morning, as a cron job to ensure that I never forget to perform my backups.

There are many options for performing backups. Most Linux distributions are provided with one or more open source programs specially designed to perform backups. There are many commercial options available as well. But none of those directly met my needs so I decided to use basic Linux tools to do the job.

CloneZilla works perfectly. It produces small image files, has integrity check and works fast. If you want to use third device as image repository you should choose device-image when creating image of the first disk and then image-device when you restore it to second disk. If you want to use only two disks - you should use device-device mode. Optionally you may want generate new UUIDs, SSH-key (if SSH server installed), and change hostname.

While there are so many tools to backup your systems, I find this method super easy and convenient, at least to me. Also, this method is way better than disk cloning with dd command. Because It doesn’t matter if your hard drive is different size, or use different filesystem.