brent Funny thing is I formatted the USB partition AND media partitions EXT4 and both, in gparted, read "FAT32." See pic. I don't understand this at all but it's irrelvant to my task.
@brent, gparted
is pretty reliable, so they are probably still FAT32. Maybe have a look at them using Disks from the Budgie menu, for a second opinion on that, it will be surprising if they don't show up as FAT32 there also.
[You can also sudo fsarchiver probe
(run it from the folder where fsarchiver is, or else specify the path to fsarchiver). That will give you a long list of mounted disks and devices, at or near the end of the list you should see the partitions that you are interested in; with device, filesystem type, and device label, and size, listed.]
It can also backup folders recursively. You could try backing up a folder with fsarchiver
to get a feel for it, it's safe enough, and you could delete the test archive later.
sudo fsarchiver savedir test-folder-backup.fsa /your/backup-folder
So savedir
tells fsarchiver what you want to do, test-folder-backup.fsa
would be the filename you want for the archive, and /your/backup-folder
would be where you want the archive to go.
You can do folder backups on your live system, but to make partition images the disk should be unmounted (this will usually apply to other methods also), so you'd normally boot from your Solus USB stick, or some other linux system on CD or thumb drive, to make a backup of your Solus partitions.
The ESP partion is not mounted after Solus boots so you make an archive of that from within your working Solus system, it is also a very small partition, so a good one to experiment with.
Quote form documentation:
FSArchiver is safe when it makes backups of partitions which are not mounted or mounted read-only. There is an option to force the backup of a read-write mounted volume, but there may be problems with the files that changed during the backup.
Good luck in your investigations, hope you find some method that works for you. Backups turn out to be very important when you need them! :-D