[balug-talk] cloning a Debian installation

[Michael Paoli]

dd(1) is fine ... with appropriate caution and due care.  Most notably:
o don't use it to read from a rw mounted filesystem (or device such
  as disk containing such)
o don't make things *too* identical where such isn't intended ("unique"
  volume/filesystem identifiers, specific host keys, IP addresses, etc.)
o hardware may need to be identical (or nearly so) for generally successful
  image-based cloning

references/excerpts:
news:1137906739.932912.234000 at g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com
news:1147144043.547872.221020 at j73g2000cwa.googlegroups.com

Quoting Dan Lyke:

> On Fri, 08 Dec 2006 11:28:17 -0800, Jonathan Jefferies wrote:
> > stress recently. But is Debian so different that it doesn't clone the
> > same as other distro's?
> 
> I think "dd", with all of its limitations, works the same across the  
> board. But something I have several times found myself doing on Debian  
> or Ubuntu machines is having different kernel, partition or whatever  
> else setups, and trying to maintain the same packages between them.