Cloning a computer

Cloning a computer means you have one computer and want to copy the complete harddisk to another. This can mean different things and can have different reasons.

Reasons

• You want to have a stand-in computer in case your "pet computer" decides to go on vacation (it breaks for whatever reason). For this, a virtual machine is not enough. It is sufficient to copy every file from computer A to computer B.
• You want to virtualize your computer. In this case you will have to dump every byte from your source (physical) to your target (virtual) computer.

Over the network

Clone a Linux computer

When cloning a Linux installation, you will be able to pack all files, like that:

cd /
tar -cv . | ssh root@192.168.0.5 "cat >slash.tar"

Clone any computer

This is how you can clone the harddisk of any computer, even if it is an encrypted Windows computer. Boot the computer from Knoppix, open a console, enter

dd if=/dev/sdx | bzip2 -z | ssh root@192.168.0.5 "(cat >backup-sdx.bz2)"

Be sure to replace /dev/sdx by the harddisk you want to clone and 192.168.0.5 by your target computer's IP.