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Could you please advice how to clone CentOS with all installed software to another box.

What tools should be used?

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Is the hardware identical, or different? If so, how different is it? – Zoot Dec 21 '10 at 17:54
Which release of CentOS do you want to clone? – kamae Feb 28 '12 at 8:30

migrated from stackoverflow.com Dec 21 '10 at 17:20

3 Answers

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Couldn't you just clone the hard drive using a dd command and stick it into a new box? Here is more on using dd: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DriveImaging

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+1 for not mentioning things like clonezilla or others when dd is perfectly capable! – g19fanatic Dec 21 '10 at 18:18
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I've used PartImage for things like that.

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While dd / ddrescue are great, it's a bit overkill if you have a huge drive and only a small part of it is used, how about just using tar? of course you will need to setup the bootloader by hand but that should be trivial.

Also check the CentOS Migration Guide.

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well there is a solution to this issue using dd as well. do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/path/to/drive/zero.img;rm /path/to/drive/zero.img Then when you're using dd to backup the drive, pipe it through gzip this will basically 'eliminate' all of the empty space as well as do great compression. This has the added benefit of cloning the whole HD and not needing to 'install' anything as well as using the smallest amount of space (for dd) possible. – g19fanatic Dec 21 '10 at 20:41
The command tar will ignore hard-link. rsync is better. – kamae Feb 28 '12 at 8:29

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