Really basic backup and restore question

[FOSS-15-Great]

Thank you all for your replies. I am stumbling at the first hurdle: I have taken my SSD out of the T440p and hooked it up to the W541 via USB. Then I booted the W541 from the Debian live USB stick.

My plan was to wipe the contents of the W541 root partition and rsync the T440p root partition in place. I did think about imaging but the drives have slightly different partition sizes so not sure that would work). I got as far as unlocking the W541 LVM but as soon as I unlocked it the drive disappeared from the files window.

Looking at the partition on DISKS it does not appear to be mounted. Looking in /media/myhome/ there is no UUID for it.

At this point I might just do the setting up of the second laptop manually (bearing in mind I'll be learning less along the way...)

[CwF]

I did think about imaging but the drives have slightly different partition sizes so not sure that would work

When I say image the disk, I do mean the whole device and not partitions. It's a single operation and I use qemu-img. After the operation don't mount or unlock, remove! There is no preparation required on the destination disk, though I might cycle or fully test the disk. It should be the same size or larger. Again, the structure of the destination disk is irrelevant.

If the destination disk is smaller you do need to get fancy. You could prepare the source disk within its OS and squeeze it down, and then image it to a file, loop mount the file and truncate, then image the resulting file to the destination disk. Generally, don't do this, but it can be done.

Earlier was a mention of things that prevent an image from one machine working in another. Not that many, but some common sense ones, anything specific! Not much prevents getting to a tty prompt, lots can bork GUI's. When using full encrypted disk images the unlock prompt can be obscured by GPU issues.