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Have you ever been disappointed with Linux? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Personally I haven't. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it's whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.

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[–] 1 point 4 months ago (4 children)

First, thank you for trying.

There's what I want and there's what I'm trying to do. 😉

Waving my magic wand, I'd like a bootable backup of my laptop's internal hard drive. This is what SuperDuper does. I would like it to be straightforward: I issue one command, then I can boot from the external hard disk to which I have backed up. For bonus points, restore is merely backup in the other direction.

That is what I'd like.

I'm cloning a drive with Clonezilla and tomorrow I'll try to boot to the backup drive. I would like to understand how restore works, but frankly, I'm not optimistic and I'm not currently eager to risk screwing up my laptop's internal hard disk.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (3 children)

    If you do disk to disk clone, you will make an exact copy of the source disk to the destination disk.

    BEWARE of booting from usb when the source drive is installed as well!

    A modern OS uses UUID's (identifiers) to manage the hard drives. You are effectively creating a drive and partitions with the SAME UUIDS in the USB drive AND the local drive.

    There are steps to manage this, but understand it could cause you issues. A simple way to manage that is make sure to simply disconnect the internal drive in the bios when you boot from USB.

    OR

    Boot normally, and add a virtual machine to the host and run your USB drive inside the host VM.

    Also, there are some good videos (from other people) on using clonezilla on their webpage, I know one of them talks about identifying the disks and walks you thought the process of making the clones and restores if that helps any.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Thank you for the warning. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes this not at all just as easy as creating a bootable backup of a Mac! And it's the kind of thing that makes "this is easy" difficult to take seriously.

    Now I know what to search for and I will probably be able to piece it together.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Ugh. No. I still don't know how to just boot this backup. When I try it in an older laptop, the keyboard and trackpad stop working once I log in. I presume this is a hardware driver problem. Presumably that's unavoidable.

    I am, of course, not eager to screw up the BIOS settings on my daily laptop.

    I couldn't figure out how to boot the cloned drive in a VirtualBox VM. The tutorials seem to assume that I have a virtual disk image or enough internal hard disk space to copy the cloned drive locally in order to run it locally. That defeats the purpose.

    So I'm stuck. If I can't just boot to the USB external drive because of UUID clashes, then I don't know what I'm supposed to have gained by cloning my laptop's internal hard disk. I have a backup that I can't safely boot to. 🤷

    I continue to be grateful to anyone willing to try to help me understand how to do this. It's literally the only thing that stops me from feeling 100% comfortable with a Linux distribution as my everyday OS. I feel like I've been living with a ticking timebomb for the past eight years.

    UPDATE: I booted to Pop!_OS, then used chroot, but this is not what I was expecting.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Well yes, but with a current Mac there are its own issues. It probably won't boot at all, or by design it will fall back to the internal drive even if you tell it to boot from USB

    It also can silently corrupt your data on either disk because of how it handles updates if you continue to do use both at the same time.

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