How to back up my shiny new OS?

[TwoFistedJustice]

I'm new to Linux and just re-installed everything after my previous Linux installation died one week after getting it set up.

So this time I'd like to have a back up so I can quickly restore it if it goes boom again.

What is the easiest most noob-friendly way to do this?

[Snowhog]

Obtain a copy of Clonezilla. It is, IMO, one of the best 'bare metal' backup utilities that exists. It's what I use.

[jlittle]

So this time I'd like to have a back up so I can quickly restore it if it goes boom again.

If you really mean "quickly restore", using btrfs is the quickest and easiest, for most types of "going boom"*. You'd still want a separate backup, but doing a snapshot every day will take seconds each time, basically the time to type the commands, and restoring back to one takes seconds plus a reboot, and is reversible.

* If your problems are caused by hardware corruption, well, btrfs would be quite vulnerable too.

[oshunluvr]

IMO best way is combo. I keep a weeks worth of daily snapshots and weekly do a backup to two different drives. I have 5 drives in my system at the moment so there's plenty of room.

The snapshots allow almost immediate roll-back if something goes wrong and the backups are, well, backups.

I have automated this BTW...

[oshunluvr]

Obtain a copy of Clonezilla. It is, IMO, one of the best 'bare metal' backup utilities that exists. It's what I use.

Totally agree with this. I keep a clonezilla bootable USB in my travel bag for when I go to sites for work.

[TwoFistedJustice]

Running Clonezilla live from a USB stick seems promising.

Will it back up my system to the same USB stick that it boots from?

I guess what I really want to know is, since I'm on an older Thinkpad with one drive, and I don't want to have a bulky hardware lying about,
what would be a good media to back up my data to?

[oshunluvr]

I don't think you can store a backup on the same thumb drive as clonezilla unless you partitioned it and were able to mount the second partition somewhere. It's possible I guess, but not trivial.

For backup storage you can get very large capacity thumb drives for pretty cheap these days.

If you're using BTRFS, I'd recommend using BTRFS for backups because you can access the files in the backups without installing or uncompressing anything. Clonezilla backups are really a bare-metal wipe-and-start-over kind of backup.

[TwoFistedJustice]

I'm definitely looking more for trivial, given my level of expertise, or rather, in-expertise.

From what I've read, BTRFS also appears to be non-trivial (to me), as it seems if you do it wrong, everything can go *poof*, and the odds of my doing it right the first, second, or third time, I believe is small.

[oshunluvr]

I'm definitely looking more for trivial, given my level of expertise, or rather, in-expertise.

From what I've read, BTRFS also appears to be non-trivial (to me), as it seems if you do it wrong, everything can go *poof*, and the odds of my doing it right the first, second, or third time, I believe is small.

While I get you're linux newish and BTRFS is totally different than what you're used to, however the entire backup sequence is simple, quick, and non-destructive. I've never heard of anyone "poofing" a BTRFS file system attempting a backup - which is simply a snapshot that you send to a different device.

I'm not a paid BTRFS spokes person or anything, but here's one way to look at it;

Clonezilla: Requires obtaining the software and creating a separate bootable device. Format is only Clonezilla accessable and must be restored to have file access. Restore requires booting to Clonezilla and restoring to a bare drive or partition (anything on it will be destroyed), then booting to something else to access your data.

BTRFS: Software is built-in to Linux. Requires no rebooting at all to either backup or restore. If backup is to a BTRFS file system, no restore is needed to access files in the backup - you can just access them. Backup can be restored to any device with a BTRFS filesystem as long as there's enough room for the files. Restoring to an existing file system with data already on it will not delete the existing data.

I don't know where you've read what, but I question it's validity. BTRFS backups are by far the most trival and least difficult backups to make, use, and restore hands down.

[oshunluvr]

I guess my point is; There are a lot of Luddites out there even in the IT and PC world - even here on this forum*. Just because it's new doesn't make it bad.

Obviously, it's your world and you will make Linux work the way you want - that's the real strength of Linux. However as you learn, remember Linux is a fast moving target. Bug fixes and new features aren't decades away like Microsoft does it, they happen in weeks or even less. Anything regarding Linux you find on the internet that's more than a few months old is suspect and should be considered out-of-date until you can prove it's not.

*Read posts about the developers increasing the security of the Dolphin file manager and the Kate text editor. The amount of push back over having to change usage methods was mind boggling to me.