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My Arch Linux installation is roughly 15 years old, rsynced from machine to machine over the years: make partitions, rsync, grub-install, rinse, repeat.

• oxplot 5y ago
  Holy wow — mine's 7 years old and I thought it was crazy. I still have the pacman logs from the first package installed. It has traveled to three different machines, three filesystems (ext4, btrfs, xfs), two boot loaders (grub, efi) and two desktop envs (gnome2, mate+compiz). I really can't imagine using anything else. AUR along with simplicity of the package source format and cleanliness of everything in general, makes this the perfect OS for a pragmalist like myself.
• 12ian34 5y ago
  nice! out of curiosity, can you detail what exactly you rsync, and which flags you use?
  • fer 5y ago
    Depends because the partition and directory structure has changed over the years, but it generally boils down to rsync -avP6AHXx --numeric-ids src dest. It requires some fiddling afterwards (not only grub-install: adjusting fstab UUIDs, adapt network interface changes, etc) but it's generally pretty painless.
    • selbyk 5y ago
      I almost posted earlier about the after-adjustments. I have 5 and 8-year installs, but I've never bothered to migrate across machines thinking it'd be too much of a hassle.
    • 12ian34 5y ago
      Ah thanks - my go to rsync flags are -hvrtP which seems like it's quite similar. Still curious about what you rsync? Presumably this is within chroot during installation?