What are we doing for disk imaging theses days?

    • LostXOR
      8•1 month ago

      No need for all these new-fangled tools when good ol’ dd does the job just fine. (Though they certainly reduce the chance of accidentally nuking the wrong disk).

  • palordrolap
    11•2 months ago

    Ones I have used: GNOME Disks’ create and restore image features. Possibly Mint’s mintstick for writing a distro’s .iso out to a USB stick. I am not too sure on that.

    I assume old-school dd still works as well, which might be a better option for scripted backups or minimal systems.

    • SayCyberOnceMoreEnglish
      4•1 month ago

      Clonezilla has been my goto backup / restore solution for years. I’ve used it on everything from RaspberryPi SD Cards to a Dell Poweredge server with PERC RAID controller (because some fool setup the wrong RAID parameters).

      I didn’t know about Rescuezilla though… so thanks for that.

      • silly goose meekah
        1•1 month ago

        Yeah I just started using Linux half a year ago and tried a few distros and DEs, but GNOME “disks” is just the easiest way to set up auto mounting and is available on any package manager I came across so far.

  • Strit
    4•2 months ago

    DD is the best for 1-1 copying, but I like to use CloneZilla, because it can compress and encrypt the images.

  • @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4•1 month ago

    Definitely ddrescue. Unlike traditional dd, it can deal with failing drives, it’s operation is resumable, and has some other features that’s helpful. I would recommend using it even if your drive is fine.
    What it produces is a byte for byte copy just like dd.

  • @Gnugit@aussie.zone
    3•1 month ago

    After learning how to install medicat i discovered ventoy. With ventoy you can copy and paste how ever many bootable iso files you like into it and run them all from the same drive/partition from a selectable boot menu. It’s amazing, I won’t be using dd anymore for boot disks.

  • @moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
    1•1 month ago

    Ventoy. I love it so much, being able to have more than one bootable iso and storage on a usb.

    Although, it is slower to boot the more folders you have, since it scans all folders, but this is configurable

    I use nix-shell to get the ventoy cli for when I need to install it to a usb stick.

  • Para_lyzed
    1•1 month ago

    Just to throw another option out there, partclone will only copy data that is being used in a partition, without all the empty space. I don’t believe it helps for encrypted partitions, but you could always just image the unencrypted filesystem with partclone to a drive with full disk encryption to work around that (and still prevent storing data unencrypted). Saves a lot of space.

    Also, in the context of backups, I often prefer to use btrfs send to create and update backups through snapshots quickly and efficiently instead of imaging (though of course that requires you to use btrfs). Full imaging is pretty inefficient for my needs, and takes a lot of time.