USING TIMESHIFT TO INSTALL YOUR MODIFIED AND
CONFIGURED DISTRO ON ANOTHER COMPUTER

One of my daily drivers is MX Linux; It is an outstanding distro and works
very well for me. When I first installed it, I made numerous configuration
changes and installed quite a few more apps which took a significant amount of time and effort. Whenever I install MX on another computer, I don’t want to have to go through all of that again. Fortunately, MX has a magnificent tool that takes a snapshot of your entire system partition as well as the boot partition and makes an .iso file that you can burn to a USB to install on another computer or to reinstall on your computer if your system develops a problem. Unfortunately, the MX snapshot tool doesn’t work on other distros; it seems to be tied to MX only.

So, what do you do if your distro is not MX and you want to install it on another computer without going through all the configurations and other app installations again ?

Well, Timeshift is a very popular app that lets you make a backup snapshot of your system so that you can restore your system to the state of when you made the last Timeshift snapshot. It works very well for that, making it a good option for backing up your system.

I’ve often wondered if somehow I could restore a Timeshift snapshot to another computer, thus doing what the MX snapshot tool does so well.

I did a lot of searching to see if that’s possible but nearly all the information I found seems to say that because of hard links to the original computer, a Timeshift file cannot be restored to another computer.

But, since I like to find out things for myself, I decided to do some experimenting along that line.

So, another daily driver distro that I like is Sparky Linux. Like MX, when I installed it, I made a lot of configuration changes and installed a number of other apps. I would like to put Sparky Linux on another computer without going through all of the configuration changes and installing the additional apps that I use. Now, Sparky does have its own backup tool called Sparky Backup System. It is ok for what it does, however, it doesn’t backup any apps that are not installed nor the boot partition nor any configurations nor personal files.
(Except it will backup the Desktop configuration if you use the Skel option before you do the backup)

So, I decided to try restoring a Sparky Timeshift snapshot to another computer using Timeshift.

And Shamzam, not only is it possible, but it is not hard at all.

Not as slick as the MX tool, but the end result is the same.
It just requires one more step than the MX snapshot tool.

And that step is installing the boot partition, which is not included in the Timeshift snapshot.

The first thing to do is to create a fresh Timeshift snapshot of your Sparky system, but make the saved location a blank USB that you have formated to the ext4 file system.

Now, since Timeshift does not save the boot partition, you will have to first put it on the target computer. The simplest way I’ve found to do this is to first install the original Sparky .iso file that you downloaded from the Sparky web site to the target computer.

Then boot the target computer up to any live Linux distro that has Timeshift on it and after inserting the USB that has the Sparky Timeshift snapshot on it, select it as the snapshot to restore and restore it to the Sparky root partition on the target computer.

Then shutdown, remove the USBs and boot up to the hard drive and voila, there’s your Sparky system just as it is on your source computer.

Here are details on how to do it:

Boot up the target computer to any live USB distro that has Timeshift on it. In another USB port, plug in the USB that has the Sparky Timeshift snapshot on it.

Start Timeshift and under Settings/location select the USB that the Timeshift snapshot is on. (you should now see the snapshot that is on the USB, click on the snapshot to select it)

Then when you select the Timeshift restore option; a ‘Select Target Device’ screen will appear. Under Path /, click the drop down block and select the Sparky root partition that you’re going to put the Timeshift snapshot on. Leave the other drop down boxes as they are. Then click Next at the bottom and Timeshift will restore the snapshot on the USB to the partition that you selected on the hard drive. (There will be a couple more screens pop up, just click the NEXT button each screen)

It’s actually that simple, I’ve done it on several computers with no problems.

Now, if your target computer already has a Linux distro on it that you want to keep, just create a partition for your Sparky Timeshift snapshot and restore
restore it to that partition. Then boot into the distro already on the target computer and do a sudo grub-update to put Sparky on the grub menu.

Another thing to consider, if you have a great deal of personal files, it would be better to make a Timeshift snapshot of just the system. Then save your personal files separately to another media using a backup app such as Grsync.
Then after your do the restore on the target computer, copy your personal files to your folder on the target computer.

Nice.
this is an Great Tool that was created,
and - now - it's even better, with this technique.