Interesting command lines for rsync, indeed.
I'll stick to cat (or dd) a partition and resize2fs the file system to the target partition's size.

What???
You want
EITHER grow a file system to the full partition's size (see #2)
OR recover "something" from the drive.

cp simply over-writes. I would start looking for a back-up.
ddrescue is useful, when dd aborts with an error, e.g. when the drive is physically damaged.
testdisk (as far as I remember) is looking for known file headers (like png/jpg images, zip/gz archives, etc) on the raw disk and trys to recover them.

Even if you would provide all information to the accident in detail, I doubt someone could help. Sorry.

Adding the daedalus-backports repository would be a convenient way to have a quite current kernel (6.9).

cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep backports
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged daedalus-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

apt install -t daedalus-backports linux-image-amd64

Beside the kernel, firmware can be a major problem especially on new notebooks. There are no backports releases by now, e.g. https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/poli … *&x=submit . I would go for the newest packages for all build-in components.

I don't know synaptic, but can parse the list to apt. If you hate terminals, just ignore this.

"listapt.txt" contains _all_ debian packages in the installed repositories (--installed or --manual-installed would do a selection like below).

You want to re-install the ones marked with "[installed]", not "[installed,automatic]". Have a good look at "[installed,local]", which were either downloaded or not in the current repositories.

cat listapt.txt | grep '\[installed,local\]'

Let's prepare the installation:
There will be errors; work on cleaned.list.txt, until apt succeeds. Then omit "-s" in the apt command.

cat listapt.txt | grep '\[installed\]' | awk -F/ '{print $1}' >cleaned.list.txt
apt install -s  $(cat cleaned.list.txt | awk '{printf"%s ", $0}') 

Too many errors? Maybe just the tasks for the big picture?

apt install  $(cat cleaned.list.txt | grep ^task | awk '{printf"%s ", $0}')

Hope this helps, and yes I'm about to do that myself.

Today I looked at some back-up copies in /root/_backup/usr/local/bin/  ... and found symliks "corrected" too.
That's not funny!

apt purge symlinks

@fsmithred:  Thanks for debsums!

@SpongeBOB:  My personal preference is to upgrade - beside the good advices above.

Not sure about the architecture, but do you have daedalus-security in /etc/apt/sources.list?

EDIT: Ups, there is another thread respective this issue.

Did you try to reset the BIOS/(U)EFI settings to system default?
There should be a menu somewhere saying something like "load save defaults".

Then maybe it is:

apt install linux-image-arm64  -s

  The switch -s is for simulation - to see what would happen. 

Package info:
https://pkginfo.devuan.org/cgi-bin/poli … 4&x=submit

History: When devuan forked debian, the std. network interface name was eth0 on both systems, so a migration does not change anything in this respect. And this is (probably) the case for Buster.
Some years later (release?) debian changed the naming convention to the current expression, devuan did not. Now the default net device names are different.

apt-get install net-tools works on any recent debian, no idea what rackspace did.

to a) Buster probably still used eth0/eth1 itself (don't remember, when the change was in debian).
Then there was no net-device-name change during migration.

to b) There is no network-auto-configuration tool involved during migration.
E.g. network-manager or connman would do such things, if installed.
When you use plain dhcp without such programs, it's your task to fix the network.

net-tools are not installed by default anymore, but present in the std. repos.

Regards