i want to test debian trixie (13) so i can report bugs and troubleshoot before the release later this year. i thought about simply installing trixie alongside my current bookworm installation, but that won’t be my scenario when the time comes, since i’ve been updating my system instead of reinstalling it since debian jessie (8) and this time it won’t be different. how can i clone my current system so i can simulate an update to trixie? do i simply create a new partition and copy my files over, then chroot to it and install grub?
There are multiple way to de this. The easiest solution would be to une a second disk with same size or bigger and clone the current one onto the new one, using dd or clonezilla
if you have enough size on your dis_ for a second root partition, you can use dd to clone the existing root partition in the new one, edit /etc/fstab on the new one to point to the correct root partition, and us grub-mkconfig if you use grub, use grub-mkconfig to reconfigure it. It should automatically detect the new partition.