Disaster scenario - how to restore everything? [Solved]

[siamhie]

And, for your own piece of mind, I would walk through booting your primary machine off of a Snapshot.

That's the first thing I do when making snapshots then moving them over to my Ventoy disk. I recently made a snapshot that had the Xanmod Rolling Release [EDGE] kernel and when I got to my desktop I had no mouse
even tho the mouse works when booting up bare metal. I suspect there may be an issue between Xanmod [EDGE] and Ventoy. Using the Xanmod Stable Mainline [MAIN] kernel showed no mouse issues.

[andymx]

Thank you all for the suggestions and I apologize if I don't reply to you soon. I've read the comments and I'll re-read them carefully in a few hours as I've spent (yet another) full day customizing MX and my head is spinning! In any case, I need to buy a few USB flash sticks for testing as well as for future backups.

[CharlesV]

And, for your own piece of mind, I would walk through booting your primary machine off of a Snapshot.

That's the first thing I do when making snapshots then moving them over to my Ventoy disk. I recently made a snapshot that had the Xanmod Rolling Release [EDGE] kernel and when I got to my desktop I had no mouse
even tho the mouse works when booting up bare metal. I suspect there may be an issue between Xanmod [EDGE] and Ventoy. Using the Xanmod Stable Mainline [MAIN] kernel showed no mouse issues.

Yup, that is a perfect example of why testing the recovery is a good thing :-)

Having used some excellent Imaging tools for years in windows, it was REALLY nice to find the MX Snapshot. This utility is the closest thing I have found to a 'running imager' for linux.

I used to use clonezilla which is great, but a bit daunting for use - and not live! And some other software I tried was good too, (gparted clone partition was pretty cool! ) I dont think anything beats dd - as long as you test and setup up a script so your not typing commands ;-/

But coming from the windows world of Acronis and EaseUS ... MX Snapshot is very impressive!

[MXRobo]

USBs, Live-USBs - like insurance, nice when you need it.

I'm not pushing these USBs, vendors, nor the quality/compatibility for Live-USBs, but not a horrible price.
I have these bookmarked.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/SanDisk-256G ... /259605765 $13
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-BAR-Plus ... r=8-2&th=1 $14
https://www.westerndigital.com/products ... 2-128G-G46 $15

Hope this doesn't violate any forum rules.

[Kester]

Hi andymx,

I'm not sure if you realize that you can continue to use Macrium Reflect to create image backup files of your MX-Linux system. You cannot install Macrium Reflect on a Linux system (except in a Windows guest system within something like VirtualBox) but you can use a live Macrium Reflect usb memory stick or optical disk created in Macrium Reflect on a Windows system. I have been making regular monthly image backups of MX-Linux over the last three years and previously with Lubuntu and Linux Mint before I discovered the benefits of MX. I have not had to restore a system for some time although I have previously successfully restored a Lubuntu system and a Linux Mint system some years back using my live Macrium Reflect usb memory stick. One aspect of Macrium Reflect which does not work in Linux is the ability to open the image file to extract individual files as you can in Windows. However, the important imaging and restoration capability is there for Linux systems including MX-Linux.

In no way am I suggesting any of the backup methods suggested previously in this thread can be ignored. Those advising are certainly more experienced than I am and give excellent advice on this and many other matters regularly on this forum but I thought you might be interested that you do not need to disregard Macrium Reflect.

[BitterTruth]

I just do a full clone of my whole hard drive every week/2weeks.

1) hook up a usb hdd, boot from MX live usb and from terminal do:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=noerror,sync bs=1M status=progress

2) walk away for 2 hours or browse the net with the live usb

3) Boot from the clone to test it and see if my latest files are there.

If my hdd fails, I can just swap out the hdd with the clone. If I my machine fails, I can just swap out the hdd (or the clone) into another machine. Hopefully.

[TTwrs]

Here is the method I've been using for several years:

1) boot from my Live USB flashdrive (the entire boot and WIP drive)

2) run MX Snapshot, 'mx-snapshot-launcher', excluding nothing and preserving all personal accounts

3) watch the entire ~1m37s pass as the 3 GB (lz4 for speed) ISO is created

4) save the ISO onto a different external drive (Ventoy, SSD, HDD, etc.), rotating off the oldest of several copies

5) use MX Live MX USB Maker 'mxlum-launcher' to burn a new Full featured drive from that ISO (~3m19s)

6) reboot with the new flashdrive, during which I create the two new home and root persistence files

7) copy the Live-usb-storage partition (the 'work' partition) over from the original drive with rsync

The 'Live-usb-storage' partition is where a lot of what I'm currently working on is stored, along with AppImages, dictionaries, POP email folders, plenty of audio and video files, and other large blobs of ones and zeros. It is regularly backed up using rsync to an external SSD (a super-fast, flashdrive-sized AXE Speedy+) or HDD. Other drives contain all other non-OS-specific data and digital media.

FWIW, I generally do work on a 17" laptop in /tmp (a tmpfs) for speed and less wear and tear on the flashdrive, and copy things elsewhere as needed and before shutting things down. Good flashdrives like the low-profile Lexar S47 last for years that way.

I have to say, MX Snapshot is one fantastic program, as are the Persistence modes of MX Linux. It couldn't be easier to create and maintain backups than it is with MX Linux. Keeping the data more-or-less separate from the 'Linux' part of the setup keeps things smaller, faster and easier to recover from a digital disaster.


Edited: added the time to burn the new flashdrive and readability tweaks.

[andymx]

Rather than create a reply individually to the previous comments, I summarize below my points.

@Charlie Brown the idea of creating a custom “fromiso” Grub entry on my current installed MX is way beyond my knowledge level. I saw a few of the “fromiso” mentions and it was all too confusing for me. Therefore, I’ll have to put this suggestion on my things-to-try-later list.

@Stevo, FreeFileSync is always a good option for me, but I thought that I should try Back In Time first as it has a built-in scheduler.

@MXRobo I used Ventoy because it allows one to put more than one ISO on the USB and choose how to boot accordingly. Nevertheless, putting the choice matter aside, I tried the MX Live USB Maker and the whole process was very fast and smooth.

Currently I have MX installed on an external 256GB SSD drive. I do backup my Home directory and the hidden files to two other external disks which I have partitioned. The other partitions on them have Windows data. When I begin using MX properly, I am going to install it on my internal disk and that disk will have enough capacity for me to partition it in order to hold the data separately.

Thank you for explaining how the USB knows my username. Anyway, you may assume that I know very little about MX Linux. My knowledge of Windows is better, but at a user rather than at a technical level.

Re my question C, re-reading it I see that what I wrote must have been confusing. Anyway, thank you for the suggested procedure.

Regarding testing if restoring from a backup is possible, is of paramount importance to me. I practice this with the Macrium Reflect rescue disks that I create as necessary for Windows and I intend to do something similar with any Live-USBs that I’ll create.

@CharlesV, I’ll stop using Ventoy to put my MX snapshots in, since my testing the MX USB Live Maker left me entirely satisfied.

Regarding doing a few test restores occasionally, I hope to acquire a second PC soon and that, as you wrote, will be really handy.

@Kester thank you for the information about Macrium Reflect. I found it too a few days ago. I don’t know how my situation may develop, but I would like it for me to stop using Windows (and therefore Macrium Reflect) in the not too distant future!

@BitterTruth, the magic language of Terminal! I hope some day to learn enough to be able to use it.

@TTwrs thank you for sharing your method. I decided that I’ll be taking regular snapshots without data once a week and create a Live-USB. I’ll be keeping four such USBs, effectively giving me the possibility to go back up to 28 days. For my data backups I’ll be using a different scheme. If I take intermediate snapshots there’s always the solution suggested by @MXRobo in response to my question C.

[BitterTruth]

@andymx Lol, I was showing off. It's actually straight from the arch wiki on dd:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dd

Great little tool and comes built in (dangerous though). Sometimes, I use clonezilla instead to do the same thing but because that is a boot only environment, I can't browse or use the machine for anything else whilst it' doing it's thing.

Code: Select all

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb conv=noerror,sync bs=1M status=progress

sudo dd - dd has to be run as root
if=/dev/sda - tells dd the input file to copy from (in this case the whole drive)
of=/dev/sdb - tells dd the output file to copy to (in this case the whole drive)
conv=noerror,sync - tells dd to continue even if errors are encountered and to sync any data left at the end. This way you ensure nothing is left if you unmount
bs=1M - tells dd what size chunks (block size) to copy data in. 1M (1 Mbyte) makes it a little bit faster for me.
status=progress - tells dd to print it's progress to the screen

I noticed Clonezilla was a much faster, maybe because it copies in bs=4096 (4Mb). Everything has it's pros and cons.

[Kester]

@andymx

@Kester thank you for the information about Macrium Reflect. I found it too a few days ago. I don’t know how my situation may develop, but I would like it for me to stop using Windows (and therefore Macrium Reflect) in the not too distant future!

The Macrium Reflect live usb memory stick or live cd/dvd, once created, are no longer reliant on Windows so you can continue to use them after ditching Windows. As I said the live media do not offer everything the Windows PC installation of Macrium Reflect offers but they do the basic system image and other partition image backups effectively and allow recovery. If you have created Macrium Reflect live media, keep it available just in case until you are completely happy with your backup arrangements.

Something else to investigate (or certainly look at) is a program called Foxclone. It was developed by a member of the Linux Mint Forum. I tried it several years ago with some success although, at the time, some of the included extras were a bit problematic for me. The program has gone through many updates since but. as I found Macrium Reflect live media together with Grsync covered all my backup needs, I've not used it since. You and any other interested forum members may care to visit https://foxclone.org/index.html to find out more.

Cheers.