[ale] dd vs clonezilla to replace hard drive

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 1/1/23 03:45, Steve Litt via Ale wrote:
> 
>> My restore process (or migration into a NEW OS) is 4 major steps:
>> 1) Base install
>> 2) Restore all HOME directories
>> 3) Restore selected system settings and data (say nginx configs and
>> DBMS data) 4) Feed the ~/apt-manual-list, into APT for installation.
> 
> The preceding is almost identical to what I do...
> 
> 1) Base install
> 
> 2) Install manual packages
> 
> 3) Restore the old home directory to (in my case) /scratch/oldhome
> 
> 4) Replace certain files in /etc, backing up the as-installed ones.
> 
> 5) Over time, copy files from /scratch/oldhome to /home/slitt, as
>     needed.
> 
> The installation of my packages takes about 8 hours because I have a
> lot of packages:


With APT, if it finds the old settings, then those will be used like it is a "reinstall" request.  That's why I tag any modified files under /etc/ and put them back BEFORE installing any manual installed packages.

Automatically installed packages will be put there during installation or by dependencies, so I don't want to force those manually.  There are lots of optimizations possible, of course.  With my slow internet, but local apt-cacher-ng setup, installing all packages is under 15 minutes.

I also copy over /usr/local/ ... as part of the core install. It holds stuff installed from source and AppImages.

Since Canonical has been forcing snap packages more and more, which is their "run-anywhere, but under Canonical's constraints" method, placing documents outside the HOME often won't allow access. Snap packages are constrained to have file access to a user's HOME directory.  If you ask nicely, you may get some packages to allow access to /mnt/ and /media/.  Forget about anywhere else. The geniuses on the snap team hard coded host 3 locations, ignoring decades of local admin and user controls for where things can be located.  Snaps are ugly towards anyone with a home directory that isn't /home/{username}. They don't work.

For example, wormhole is a snap package:

$ wormhole
Command 'wormhole' is available in '/snap/bin/wormhole'
The command could not be located because '/snap/bin' is not included in the PATH environment variable.
wormhole: command not found

$ /snap/bin/wormhole
Sorry, home directories outside of /home are not currently supported.
See https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/11209 for details.

I have no idea what they were thinking forcing Linux computers to only use /home/ for all HOME directories. A symlink to the real location doesn't work.  They suggest using a bind mount.  How is an enterprise with 3000 users, NFS mounted HOME directories with multiple OSes supposed to do that?  It is unrealistic to even ask. IMHO.