The past couple of days I’ve been doing a lot of reading about backup solutions, in particular - automatic, scheduled backup of a complete disk image. Coming from Windows, I was using Macrium Reflect for this. This solution worked very well in that it will snapshot a running system, including all partitions, and back it up as a background task. It would create an encrypted, compressed file on an external drive (or wherever you chose) and then add incremental (or differential) backups on top of that base image on a schedule you chose. I preferred this solution as I don’t want to reinstall my base system for as long as I can avoid it, it was a set-it-and-forget-it solution, it included the ability to create a bootable USB recovery disk and it reliably restored the image to a new disk in the case of disk failure.
I’m curious if any of you all have a similar backup solution in place.
For now, I’m going to image my entire disk using Clonezilla.
from your M$ system?
How much time does it take to copy the entire system and data each time?
On Blu-ray, DVD … ?
Garuda use snapshots (its not a backup) from your system.
Just save your important data and .config + .local folders with rsync (grsync) or borg (vorta) to a secure cloud or external storage.
Hardware crash?
Use live ISO, install Garuda and restore your /home folder.
I recommend if you want a full system is to set up a nas can use a pie an external drive or old PC with some drives. have it back up your /home. and set up a hook on garuda to print your installed software when running updates it prints it out as a txt file. an have it do one more thing image the whole drive ones a week or month depending might seem excessive but depending on what kind a issue or failure you covered.
It is possible to image one hard drive to another hard drive using the dd command.
I do this with SSD drives in a hot swap rack. I simply copy my current drive to a similar drive. I then swap out the current drive and replace it with the newly imaged drive. Full backup done in minutes.
The most reliable way to image one disk to another drive is from a live boot environment. However, if I’m in a rush I simply dd an image from the running system to a similar backup drive. While not exactly recommended, copying the drive from the running system seems to work just fine. I simply make sure I’m not running any demanding applications during the few minutes it takes to image the drive.
Using dd is super reliable, but you have to be extremely careful of the destination you are copying the image to. Select the wrong destination drive and you just wiped that drive. Just a word to the wise, to those intending to use dd, it will do exactly what you tell it to do. So be sure you don’t make any mistakes when issuing dd commands or you might learn a “life lesson”.
When I have reinstalled a system with all the programs I need, I always create a backup of partitons with Clonezilla. I do this every 6 months. After 12 months I delete the first backup so I always have 2 of them.
Otherwise, I use grsync to create weekly incremental backups of .config and .local to another internal and 2 external drives.
This has worked well for me, the time required is minimal, and no proprietary software is involved.
No it wasn’t everyday. It was weekly, more or less. I’m not sure how much time it took because it happened in the background and it didn’t significantly slow down the system. That was part of the beauty of that particular solution. It backed up automatically via wifi to my NAS.
Your suggestion is valid, I just need to spend some time to figure out all the important directories to backup.
Everyone who replied had a valid solution. But I think tbg was closest to what I’m after. Perhaps I can learn how to setup a scheduled script to use dd to accomplish my goal.
Thanks to you and everyone who responded with suggestions!
