I am not exactly well versed in the ways of backing up an entire Arch install and was hoping you wonderful folks here could help.
Background info:
So I installed Arch on my Lenovo Yoga 7i, after a bunch of mishaps, so that prompted me to want to create a backup image of my machine
So far I have arch with kde setup, Snapper and automatic snapshots for when installing and upgrading, and I have them accessible in my grub menu for recovery that way.
I am mildly a data hoarder I suppose, so I have tons of space.
What I am looking for is a way to backup the entire disk as an image. I have made an image with DD and a live distro.
Though I'm not 100% confident it would be an adequate full backup.
How do you all recommend making an entire system backup? Bonus points for being able to live boot it for testing
Any suggestions?
If you're using Snapper does that mean that you're using btrfs? If so, you can use
btrfs sendandbtrfs receiveto respectively save or restore a snapshot to/from a file. Well copied from zfs ;-)I am not familiar with btrfs send and receive. But I have a new rabbit hole to venture down. I don't have any ZFS storage setup, but I can expand! Thank you for the tip!
clonezilla can backup whole drives/partitions, but it doesn't allow booting from an image directly (by itself), but (with some tools) it's possible to mount a partition to a directory.
May have to give Clonezilla a try. I have tried to use my medicat USB to backup to external HDD and it wasn't playing nicely with Macrium Reflect or the other backup tools on there.
I would back up data (ie /home, /var, /etc) with Borg. If things break, just do a fresh install and restore data.
If a server, run it as a proxmox guest and snapshot the image on a schedule.
There are also things you could maybe do with ZFS.
Timeshift is what you are looking for if you want a functional backup system.
