mx snapshot does not remember /etc/fstab etc [Solved]

[MXRobo]

For clarification – and I'm not stating that anyone suggested that I was, but I wasn't making a renaming suggestion.

However, I do notice that a lot of new MX-Snapshot users - I suppose new to MX, often don't fully grasps that the ISO is an ISO, and ask questions (I can't recall, because they're not logical to what MX-Snapshot does) maybe about it fitting a particular partition scheme or matching with something – maybe like it's a clone or something.

Anyway – Cheers!

[DukeComposed]

However, I do notice that a lot of new MX-Snapshot users - I suppose new to MX, often don't fully grasps that the ISO is an ISO, and ask questions

The MX Snapshot application literally states "Snapshot is a utility that creates a bootable image (ISO)". It's at the very top.

If it were renamed MX ISO people would ask questions about why it only makes ISOs of systems. If it were renamed MX Archive people would ask why they can still change or delete files during a live session. MX Snapshot-of-Your-System-That's-an-ISO-Which-Can-Also-Be-Used-as-an-Installer-But-Let's-Be-Reasonable-About-It is a little hard to remember.

Not realizing that your fstab is a per-system setting and that installing your snapshot to different hardware is possible without it being a hard-coded setting is a neat little gotcha. Most users are going to not want their snapshots to be tied to a specific device. Others, clearly, have the expectation that MX Snapshot is just a fancy form of dd and will make a perfect copy of their system for restoration purposes. It does not. Clonezilla is a nice option to consider if you want to save an image of a working machine and, later on, restore it exactly.

[BitJam]

@DukeComposed said:
MX Snapshot-of-Your-System-That's-an-ISO-Which-Can-Also-Be-Used-as-an-Installer-But-Let's-Be-Reasonable-About-It is a little hard to remember.


Making a bootable live iso from a running installed system is not trivial. There are many special cases. We ended up creating systems to keep track of all these special cases as they arose over the years. We keep track in: the live-files directories; the exclude files lists; and in the script installed-to-live. This systematic approach allowed us to coordinate change in iso-snapshot, live-remaster, our live system, the build-iso system, and occasionally the installer. Our goal was to allow people to move seamlessly from live to installed and back to live again. Over and over, if desired.

The best we could do was to try to not do anything catastrophic and then do the best thing for most people. It is a very powerful tool because it makes it easy for people to "roll their own" distro. I know of none better. But it's not going to work for everyone in all situations.

There are other backup tools that do make a near perfect copy of your system. These, of course, won't run live.

[fkam18]

My 2 cents: From the name "MX-Snapshot", maybe, but from what it actually does, not so much; because it creates an ISO

Maybe at some point will change the name of that to "mx-iso-maker".

The origin of the tool was an "iso-remaster" script that anticapitalista was using to mount ISOs and edit stuff and repackage them back to ISO, together with BitJam we figured out how to do it so we can actually create an ISO from a live environment, hence "snapshot" initially was working only with live environment if I remember correctly and with that it didn't need much resetting because it would mostly duplicate the live environment and just compressed it to a linuxfs, but once we figured out that we can do it from an installation we needed to exclude a bunch of files and to reset other files to some sane settings to make it work as a live environment -- it's pretty much a "installed-to-live" program (just as the name of the CLI tool that BitJam developed as a helper for the GUI, that's why we have a "/usr/sbin/installed-to-live" script that's part of mx-remaster)

Would be nice to know in future what files are reset ie not copied from the live environment:-) In this case, I suppose perhaps at least /etc/fstab will be reset to ensure the live usb can boot and mount. One thing though, is that since this is a snapshot from a "live" working environment, in theory it is working already hence the /etc/fstab vanilla as is should be a working version to clone rather than resetting it to original. I still think everything should be cloned from live without reset in this case.