These are the bunch of overengineered scripts that allow me to take an old Ubuntu laptop's backup, take the important user data from it, migrate that to Linux Mint and unsnappify it without interrupting use of the old laptop, and then prepare it so it will run a proper setup wizard on first boot to set up the new laptop that will run the copy of Linux Mint in the end.
For this purpose, I set up:
- The old laptop - The old Linux install machine, in my case an old Acer Aspire E5 with Ubuntu 22 on it. Runs Veeam Agent for Linux, backs up to NAS.
- A hypervisor - I will use VMs to do a migration of data from the old laptop to Linux Mint without interrupting work on the actual device. In this case, I used Proxmox. It hosts:
- VM 1 (source VM) - Holds the files of the old laptop from the Veeam backups on NAS so the Linux Mint VM can migrate the important parts over via SFTP. A backup restore script runs regularly.
- VM 2 (Linux Mint VM) - Runs a copy of Linux Mint that will be sysprepped. A separate disk hold