Migrating to a new machine

Bluefin and Aurora
1

Hi y’all,

Long time Fedora Workstation user here, but sort of new to Project Bluefin (Loving it!).
I’m about to receive a new laptop in the mail, and I’m confused about how to migrate my existing Bluefin setup to the new machine.

Is it as simple as backing up and restoring my /var/home/user/ directory after installing Bluefin on the new machine with the same username?

Should I just backup and restore /var/ onto the new machine?
Would I need to run a Live USB OS to do the restore?

What exactly should I do to ensure that:

  • My Flatpaks on the new machine just work and have the same configurations.
  • My distrobox containers are migrated to the new machine and work.
  • My Homebrew apps are backed up and restored. I assume I can export a list of installed apps to a text file somehow and then just reinstall them on the new machine?
  • I don’t have any permissions issues after restoring data. I should be able to reboot and get back to work :slight_smile: .

Thanks for any pointers in the right direction here :slight_smile:

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2

If you’re really looking to transfer everything without having to reconfigure your accounts and preferences, my suggestion would be to use a disk cloning app like Clonezilla (https://clonezilla.org/). This will capture your existing system disk to a USB drive or another server. Then use it again to restore that image to the new system.

However, there may be some aspect of the new machine which won’t be accounted for by taking an image. It’s unlikely but I’m just starting off with BlueFin products so I’m not sure how far they deviate from Silverblue in this respect. However, you should be able to rebase to another version relatively easily if, for example, your current machine is installed with the DX or GTS variant and your new machine has an NVidia card in it.

I hope it goes well for you!

Regards,
-Paul

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