I am curious if this is possible. I have an IPFire device (A) that is on a network that is going away. I want to use that device to upgrade an older IPFire device (B) that has inferior hardware. Could I back up device B, then restore that backup to device A? Or should I do a fresh install on A before restoring the backup from B?
I would do a fresh install; I wouldn’t restore the configuration from another system. A backup is fine for restoring to the same hardware.
You can restore from backup A to device B (or B to A)
- If they are using the same or immediately preceding IPFire version
- If the hardware configuration is different, it may be helpful to re-detect the sensors:
www.ipfire.org - Migrate to new hardware
Edit : Or add to /var/ipfire/backup/exclude.user
var/log/rrd
var/log/vnstat
Before the backup
The backups are not very dependent on the hardware, so I would say yes you can do this. There are however some settings that you will want to look at like interface configuration and so on.
We do recommend to use a backup to migrate (usually to bigger hardware), so I don’t see why this case would be very different.
Thanks for the replies. I won’t save that much time by skipping the fresh install, so I think I will play it safe and go that route, then restore the backup after the fresh install.
During new version testing, I always follow this procedure:
- Back up (and add-ons) my production IPFire (N355, 2xAQC113 + 4xI226-V)
- Install the new version on my test IPFire (N100, + 4xI226-V)
- Restore the backups
And generally, it works well (except for very few bugs 
).
And that is why we are doing the testing 