Now that I’ve used Ubuntu MATE for a +1 year I’ve had a lot of lessons learned and I am ready to do a clean install. Following the clean install my plan is to back up files /clone the drive to another machine in the event there is a catastrophic failure. Noting that rsync is the status quo, it is a bit slow and unless I am out of date I believe it is single threaded. I think more ideally I would want to clone the drive to simply swap and play.
Here is my setup(s):
Computer #1 (Mate) - drive to be backed up
Computer #2 (Windows 10) - back up drive location
Direct connection via 10 gig thunderbolt QNAP adapter
Two identical Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB drives
In general, happy to hear your favorite/fastest sync tool.
In this situation I would like to clone the drive. Is this possible? It might be as simple as mounting the drive as a network location once I find the ideal software to do so.
Generally “DD” is used … BUT I’m curious to hear If there is a tool on Linux that can do e.g what Acronis true image does in windows and that is you can clone a drive to a image file but have the resultant image file be roughly the size of your “used” data or less if compression is turned on . So for example if I have a 4tb drive , I have only used 1tb of space and 3tb free … I’d want the image file to be 1tb in size and not 4tb…
For Linux media I use Clonezilla, which is Linux-based and usually packaged as a bootable ISO. It can image drives, clone between drives, and so on.
Images of drives are only as large as the used space on a drive, which is handy. It also supports compression, and NTFS partitions. I’ve restored Linux installations from Clonezilla image backups to hardware drives numerous times and have never had an issue; it always boots right back up where I left off.
Thats interesting. I wonder if something exists like that in a non-bootable iso format. That will def be useful for me in other scenarios thanks for sharing
Was hoping to schedule a backup on per se a bi-weekly basis on off peak hours. Basically a set and forget without manual intervention or downtime.
When I moved my Windows 7 install from a spinning drive to an SSD I used Clonezilla and worked fine. I have also recovered from package upgrade issues on Linux with Clonezilla backups. So +1 for Clonezilla. It supports backing up to network shares which is super convenient. Recently started using timeshift + rsync for periodic back up of my Linux partition.
Yes via live bootable media… typically a USB drive these days. Does anyone burn CDs anymore In my view it is best to dismount the partitions you’re imaging rather than do it live on the system you’re booted into.
I use Syncthing to keep the photos from my smartphone (and camera when I’m on the road) synced to two locations and it works really well.
It’s fast, painless once you get the hang of it and really customizeable in the behaviour (file versioning, retention after deletion, etc.).
+1 to clonezilla. I used it recently when upgrading my games drive. Had a mini heart attack when the 2tb drive showed up as 480gb.
Fortunately, I had some experience messing around with drive partitions in windows, so I just checked the partitions and added the unallocated space to 480gb partition
In my view it is best to dismount the partitions you’re imaging rather than do it live on the system you’re booted into.