Full system restoration on another computer - Tutorial

Asked by Paul Necsoiu

I have been playing with this app about 2 days trying to figure out how to restore a snapshot to another computer, and because despite the fact it's a great app it lacks a good documentation, I will post here what it worked for me and I invite others to make their own suggestions and post their successful configurations.

To make a restoration on another computer you must fallow the next steps:

Step 1. Make a snapshot of the current computer (say computer A) with Back in Time (root) version.
               When the snapshot is ready Back in time will save the snapshot under a folder structure which will look like this:
                       --backintime
                            -- hostname (hostname of computer A)
                                 -- username (username of the user that made the snapshot which in this case will be the root user)
                                      -- profile (which is 1 for the Main Profile)
Step 2. Install Ubuntu on the computer were you want to restore the snapshot (computer B).
Step 3. Install Back in time on this new computer (Computer B).
Step 4. Lunch Back in time (root) version on computer B.
Step 5. In the Back in time settings window make this selections:
                    a) Where to save snapshots: select the location where you saved the snapshot.
                    b) Advanced -> Host : enter the hostname from the step 1.
                    c) Advanced -> User : enter the username from the step 1 (in this case "root")
                    d) Advanced -> Profile: enter the profile number from step 1.

Step 6. Now under the snapshots window you can select the snapshot made on computer A and in the right window you can select which folder to restore.

Further I will post some details about the computers on which I made a successful restoration following the steps above:

1.
TARGET COMPUTER : VirtualBox
OS: : Ubuntu 14.04.1
RESTORED FOLDERS : /bin /home /lib /lib64 /opt /root /sbin /usr /var
RESULT: The system on the computer was identical with the one from the computer A. All the applications worked perfectly even the one installed in Wine.
PROBLEMS: At the first attempt after restoring the /usr/lib folder the computer didn't restarted correctly and I wasn't able to make it work. I don't know why this happened because the second time everything was OK.

2.
TARGET COMPUTER : Toshiba Satellite laptop
OS: : Ubuntu 14.04.1
RESTORED FOLDERS : /bin /home /lib /lib64 /opt /root /sbin /usr /var
RESULT: The system on the computer was identical with the one from the computer A. All the applications worked perfectly even the one installed in Wine.
PROBLEMS: No problems.

PS: I'm aware that this isn't the right place for this tutorial but I invite others which made successful restorations on different machines to post their configurations and encountered problems.

Also maybe somebody else will find a better place for this tutorial (or maybe for a better one with pictures etc.) on the official site or somewhere on a blog.

PS to PS: Please excuse my poor English :)

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Germar (germar) said :
#1

Hi Paul,

Thanks for this tutorial. It's great and I'd like to add this to FAQ.

Just one note:
with BIT >= 1.1.0 step 5 will be done automatically. BIT will ask you at first start if you would like to restore an old config and also searches for them. You just need to select the correct one.

Documentation need to be rewritten from scratch. I'm not good at this and I'm also not sure, where to put it. I'm still hoping someone would show up some day and say 'Hey, I'd like to do this!' ;-D

Regards,
Germar

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Paul Necsoiu (paul-necsoiu) said :
#2

Yes it's true what you say about step 5 but for me that worked only on the first configuration (on the virtualbox) where the computer had the same hostname, but with the second computer (the laptop) where the hostname was different BIT wasn't able to find my snapshots until I changed the hostname like in step 5. So in the end I think that for restoration on completely different computers the Step 5 should be detailed (just in case).

Can you help with this problem?

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