We are currently using Rocky Linux 9 to host our Virtualmin server but are planning to move it to a Debian 13 server soon. Will a simple backup and restore work? We would be using most of the same services like Apache and Postfix but configurations for those are very different from one distro to another. Will Virtualmin convert those when restoring the backups?
It’s more trouble than going to a similar OS, but if you’re keeping the same services, it can be reasonably painless.
Note that you cannot restore the base configuration for those services or Virtualmin itself across very different distros, but you can restore domains. You’ll want to install Virtualmin and configure it how you like it, and then restore your domain backups.
You can’t simply copy the configs for Apache/Postfix/etc. over from the old system, and we don’t even try to make that kind of migration work. Virtualmin will handle the differences in how the Virtual Servers are laid out (e.g. Apache gets VirtualHosts in individual files in /etc/apache2/sites-available rather than the EL standard of putting them all in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf).
So, short answer: It’d be easier if you were going to Rocky 10. But, it won’t be terrible as long as you set the system up basically the same as your old one, in terms of how Virtualmin is configured (including Server Templates and Virtualmin Configuration, which you probably can’t safely bring over as they include OS-dependent bits) and any custom stuff you’ve done in Postfix, Apache, etc. before restoring the domains.
Prepare for it to take a little more time and testing, but it’s not all that scary.
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This won’t help this case, but the mechanism would be fairly easy to implement.
Old server you do an export of settings and virtualmin configured services and Only the settings configured in virtualmin/webmin gui would be migrated.
This file could be presented during the installation of virtualmin on the new system.
Of you were crazy, you could also perform the account migrations during the setup procedure.
Also I appreciate it would toanmore than 5 minutes.
You could maybe do a setting migration after setup but depending on how sevices are thereight be mixed results, but if you stuck to those configured in the GUI migration should be safe.
My 5c 
I love Debian… and I’ve done a bunch of migrations from Debian to Debian… but if I were on Rocky 9 ??? I’d just move to Rocky 10!!!