MX Linux Forum

hi is there a good, fast, secure software that i can use to make an image of my MX-Linux System?

which one are you using and you are satisfy with that?

MX Snapshot is included on MX. Please read the manual.

very nice. can i with that make an backup and restore it?
i am thinking that the backup is possible to save it directly on a external hdd?
does it say before how many GB he needs?

sisqonrw wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 7:57 am very nice. can i with that make an backup and restore it?

It looks like the MX User Manual comes in several languages and has two sections on backup software and best practices ("4.8.1 Backup" and "6.6.4 Live Remaster (MX Snapshot and RemasterCC)", with links to YouTube tutorials, too).

You can even use the same iso on different machines. I have 2, a laptop & a minipc, & also use the same passwords just for simplicity's sake.

sisqonrw wrote: Sat Dec 28, 2024 7:57 am very nice. can i with that make an backup and restore it?
i am thinking that the backup is possible to save it directly on a external hdd?

Does that mean you want to backup by cloning your hdd?
Because that can be done directly, without creating a bootable *.iso file.

LuckyBackup, TimeShift, MX-Snapshot, rsync through the Terminal, dd through Terminal, 3rd party Cloud backup, and a myriad of other options in the standard Debian Repos.

It all depends on what exactly you want to backup. We've seen reports here of folk using MX-Snapshot to create an ISO image of their complete system as large as 700-800GB in size, and verified them to be a workable full-recovery solution.

Backup of the system:

1) I use MX-snapshot to create an iso file which I store safely in an MX live USB. I recently did a snapshot of my newer lappy's MX23 to install on my old ASUS laotop.
2) Once every few months I use GParted, while booted into another distro on my multiboot PC, to copy the MX [and any other distro's] partition to an external USB drive

Backup of my data, which is in a separate Data partition used by all my distros:
1) I use Luckupbackup [GUI for rsync] to backup the Data partition to another external USB drive
2) I also backup to my NAS drive

Timeshift is to me not really a true backup solution. It creates a Restore point snapshot(s) for your system, and if your system is borked after an update, you can revert your system to any of the Restore points reflected by the various Timeshift snapshots you have saved. I don't bother to use it for MX since Debian Stable is just super stable for me. I only use Timeshift for my Manjaro and Arch installs. But it's really up to you, and perhaps I don't have issues because I don't have Nvidia graphics which from what I see tends to get messed up after a kernel upgrade/install. Perhaps if I used Nvidia I would be using Timeshift on all my distros!

It's to be noted that my Data includes my customisation stuff [icons, themes, conkies, wallpaper, the UIP files, xfce panel backup files], which is why I'm not too concerned about not having Timeshift for most of my distros. If something is really messed up, I can either reinstall [last resort] and then redo the customisation, or most of the time I simply copy and paste back from my external USB drive the last working gparted backup of the distro in question. I don't have to run a subsequent sudo update-grub from the distro that controls grub [older backups may be running on different kernels] because I have a custom grub config file that looks not for specific kernels but simply the existing grub.cfg file on each distro's root partition.

Is the backup of MX-snapshot an image of your PC?

i have done it with mx-snapshot. I have a iso file now. for what is it? to make a bootable usb stick to restore the backup?