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Recommendations for disk imaging?

Is anyone doing image backups of their system drives? I'd like to make a couple.

In one case to preserve, at least for a while, my old Ubuntu drive, just in case I want to reference anything. Becasue I want to repurpose that SSD for other experimentation.

I'm also at a point where I want to make an image of my Artix install, just in case... I really don't think I'm going to mess it up, but....

I want something better than dd, in part because dd will copy all blocks, no matter if they're used.

I've used Clonezilla in the past, and it worked, but the UI was awful.

So, I went looking. So far:
  - Foxclone looks very nice.
  - gnome-disks has a "create disk image" operation.
  - SystemRescue has fsarchiver, but apparently no disk imaging? I've read that it includes partimage. But partimage is no longer being developed, and has been replaced by partclone.
  - G4L
  - Knoppix - can be used as a "rescue" system, but doesn't specifically mention imaging programs.

Whatever it is, it has to be available on a bootable ISO, so I can image the drive in a quiescent state.

Re: Recommendations for disk imaging?

Reply #1 –
I'd mount the source and destination locations from an iso or alternate partition and use rsync for regular backups, cd to the source root dir and:
Code: [Select]
# rsync -aHAXS --delete-after ./* /mount/point/of/your/backupdir
If you want to save a one time copy you could use # cp -a instead, the advantage of rsync is that it doesn't waste time copying files that already exist, but either of these methods would require some tweaks to make them bootable again on restoration because they are copies of the files and not images of the whole drive including partitions, and it might get more complicated if you have multiple partitions, like a separate /home, you'd have to think about what you need to mount and how you wanted it saved.
I've never tried this, but virtual machines offer some impressive whole file system compression options, if you got a cloned image then you could put it in a VM to make a VM image so you could boot in whenever you wanted but it would be compressed on your drive so take up even less space than a copy of the files, although of course you could compress those too, however that would make it slower to access them later.

Re: Recommendations for disk imaging?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: ####### – on
I'd mount the source and destination locations from an iso or alternate partition and use rsync for regular backups, cd to the source root dir and:
Code: [Select]
# rsync -aHAXS --delete-after ./* /mount/point/of/your/backupdir
... either of these methods would require some tweaks to make them bootable again on restoration because they are copies of the files and not images of the whole drive including partitions
Being able to easily get back to a bootable drive is part of what I want to do.
Quote from: ####### – on
I've never tried this, but virtual machines offer some impressive whole file system compression options, if you got a cloned image then you could put it in a VM to make a VM image so you could boot in whenever you wanted but it would be compressed on your drive so take up even less space than a copy of the files, although of course you could compress those too, however that would make it slower to access them later.
I've been running VirtualBox for years, though haven't installed it in Artix. Still on the fence about whether it's something I want to mess with, since I haven't needed to use it for quite a while.

Re: Recommendations for disk imaging?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: just_jed – on
Being able to easily get back to a bootable drive is part of what I want to do.
Check out rsnapshot. It's a wrapper around rsync which creates incremental backups by just hard linking files which have not changed.

I've restored the rootfs of multiple systems many times with it.

I actually use another wrapper around rsnapshot. rsnapshot-timestamp . Not updated in years but still works.