A way to clone my Linux?

Edward78

In case my HDD starts going. is there a program I can get that will make a .iso of Solus exactly how I have it now?

DataDrake

Edward78 No. But there have been discussions of Disk Imaging and backup solutions, if you search around the forums.

Dean

Edward78 Maybe using clonezilla. I have used it to clone from one drive to another, but I remember that it has an option to copy to image.

Edward78

BtrFS can snapshot, but I heard you have to set up the FS a certian way or it might give you trouble.

DataDrake

Edward78 We don't support brtfs for Solus installs. In general, I don't recommend using it at all unless you have a good backup solution. btrfs has a habit of breaking on a kernel downgrade (which we need to be able to do) and from time to time on a kernel upgrade. I would also caution anyone who thinks that snapshots or RAID are a substitute for backups. Unless your data gets duplicated to another physical location, it's not a backup.

Walnut

DataDrake Unless your data gets duplicated to another physical location, it's not a backup.

Absolutely.
I can't tell you the number of times I had someone bring an external hard drive in for data recovery and say "This is my backup" only for for me to ask "Oh so you still have the originals somewhere" and them to then explain no, because it's on an external drive it's a backup.
A backup is a second copy of the files, saved to a different physical location (Edit to correct poor explanation)
Anyway, back to the original question.
Scott Dwyer developed an incredible tool called hddsuperclone. It has, in my own testing, performed as good as most hardware solutions (I'm unsure if I can name the products I tested it against but If someone can clarify I will add more information) when it comes to imaging drives.

Now for the caveats:
Doesn't run from a bootable iso
Does a complete image of the drive, unallocated space as well as allocated.
Drive you want to clone needs to be unmounted so it's easier to clone the drive from a second PC.

On the positive
Clone times are fast considering it doesn't care about file systems or file structure, it's doing a raw copy. Sector by sector.
Clone is not in a proprietary format,

One last point . If you use Scott"s tool make sure you check source and destination drives twice. I showed someone how to clone with this tool once and they copied a blank drive over the top of the drive they wanted to backup. Measure twice cut once.

Scott's tool is available here (Last tested on Solus using 2.2.17 .x64)
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddsuperclone

Edward78

Ya, I wish I could just backup my linux partition..

appmath

Edward78
If all you want to do is backup a partition (or whole disk) you can use the ancient and powerful unix command dd. This will backup the entire thing, both used and unused space, so it'll occupy far more space than you need (the size of the partition or disk).
I usually make a snapshot of my whole nvme ssd (500G) several times a year. I boot off the live iso image so my ssd isn't being used during the backup. This is fairly involved and will require you to do some research (ie, mounting the receiving storage for the backup as well as the correct parameters for dd).

bionicmac

Edward78
Clonezilla

Axios

This is the way I did it with windows havent got it set up for linux yet
1 Would do fresh install of windows (whatever i was using)
2 Install all drivers
3 Do all system updates
4 Delete all stuff I wasnt Using
5 Test everything working
6 Image disk (This would give you a fresh install for that computer with everything current)
7 Image can later be restored (gives you a fresh computer without programs)
8 Image and backups with programs installed
9 Am leaning towards foxclone (But got test it more, for backups I use vorta for now)
(Note: found over the years was easier to image and backup than sit at computer reinstalling windows or doing disk recovery and at the price of disks now days It shouldnt be an issue) (Just info)

DataDrake

Walnut I more meant along the lines of RAID and disk snapshots both being susceptible to local failures.

RAID is good for keeping things going when a drive fails, but you can still have subsequent drive failures and lose all the data. It might save you having downtime and having to restore from a full backup, which takes time. Rebuilding a 10TB HDD at 100MB/s takes around 27 hours. That's just to write the data, not counting the time to verify, or the time to read that data from another source. If you got a bad batch of HDDs and didn't mix and match in your machine, that's a bad time waiting to happen.

Something like btrfs or an LVM snapshot is only as effective as the storage target where you write them. If it's the same drive, that's worthless. If it's another drive in the same system, it's better, but susceptible to cascade failure. The farther that data gets from the original system, the safer it is from a local failure.

Axios

Walnut I see he know has a livecd.

Walnut

Axios Thanks for the updated info, grabbing it now to take a look.

stalebrim

You can also rsync your whole system to another location. It's not advised to do it on a running system, however.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/rsync#Full_system_backup

Edward78

I just want a way to put everything (Linux wise) back as it is, on a new drive when this one goes.

Axios

Guess I am missing something?