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 -cvlz . | ssh root@192.168.0.5 "cat >slash.tar.gz"

The "l" stands for "local file systems".

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.