Recently I faced with a problem: how to migrate my data from my laptop to another machine. Because my OS is an Ubuntu, I wanted to recreate the environment and copy the home directory with all configuration files. It sounds like a trivial task…
At first, I have been thinking about simple copying files and configurations. But I wouldn’t want to do a lot of work to install all packages that I have after that. Some kinds of administrator’s job are not for me. You know, it’s not for me. I don’t have so much patience.
I needed a quick solution, without a pain and stolen time. Ok, I started to search a tool that would simplify my boring routine with that. After few seconds I found Aptik.
Aptik is a tool to backup\restore and migrating system settings and data to the fresh installed OS or after re-installing\upgrading. Seems that is what I need. But a version of OS on my laptop is lower than on another machine. 15.10 vs 16.04. I didn’t know, this would be a problem or not. Fine, let’s go I said to myself.
Preparing:
sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install aptik
After that, I opened Aptik via superuser(it’s asking you about that). Oh, It could save all : ppas, themes, packages, installed software, application settings and etc. Mamma mia perfecto!
I selected a path to my backup directory on external hard drive and clicked backup for parts which I wanted. Ok, I installed Aptik onto another machine and plugged a hard drive with saved backups. For that moment all steps were correct . I didn’t see any errors.
And on a remote machine, I got a first interesting thing. All software sources were restored correctly but download packages were not. Ok, looks OS versions is not compatible backward. (Seriously?) When I had been restoring Themes Unity had broken. Oh, man. It wasn’t funny. I reinstalled Unity.
Application Settings and Installed Software were restored correctly. At the first look…
As I recognized later some software were not installed. I have been installed it manually. Some icons were broken. I don’t know why, but Aptik didn’t save my Icons correctly. When I copied one manually, an application was opened normally, yeah looks like I was right.
Two days of copying and restoring were unforgettable. Why we can’t create a system like a VCS(git)? Just commit changes into the control system and pulling on another.
Hey, boy, do you hear something about rsync? My dev folder with all sources and projects that I have I synchronized via rsync:
rsync -ravh --progress -e ssh /home/user/Dev remote:/home/user/Dev
I already had a connection between my laptop and remote desktop in another terminal when I had been synchronizing folder. But anyway it doesn’t matter. The key for the remote machine was in .ssh/known_hosts – that was significant.
Remember! Your system is under potential risk by rsync. Do not use it for production, please, be careful and do not compromise your security.
But, anyway, thank you Aptik, this tool saved me a lot of time.
A further journey I will be in manual mode to restore my environment on new machine
Silver bullet is a myth
