Foxclone - linux image backup, restore & clone

[Larry78723]

It should be working now.

[rossdv8]

A quick curiosity question about Foxclone.
I was backing up my /home, just copying the contents to an external USB 3 drive, but the process is painfully slow, and breaks occasionally. I have done it before, and I used to do it with Disk Destroyer (using a script) or with CloneZilla (which I haven't downloaded lately although I use FileZilla all the time.

So, it is pretty obvious that using Foxclone on a root partition is not a good plan (at least on a MOUNTED root - I usually have one or two that are not mounted).
Is Foxclone a live USB or CD ONLY iso, or can it be installed, and do a background backup of /home while other stuff is being used?
And as I write this I can see where there might be a problem - but also that other backup tools work happily on an active /home.

[AZgl1800]

Foxclone is booted from a Flash Drive, so the PC's drive is NOT mounted in any way, period.

that is why it works so well.

Andy has a way to boot the backup drive with Foxclone, but for me, it is not practicable because my extUSB Seagate Hub backup drive has two partitions already, one is NTSF for Windows use, and the other is ext4 for Linux use.

[AndyMH]

Unless you want to risk corruption, you need to unmount any partition you are imaging (so you can guarantee there are no changes while you are copying it). Booting normally you can't unmount your / or /home partitions. That is why you have to download an iso, burn it to a stick and boot from it. This is also true of rescuezilla and clonezilla. As well as the iso, you can download a deb for foxclone and install it in another copy of mint on another drive. That is how I do it, I have a copy of mint installed on my backup drive with foxclone installed in it. It means I can boot off the backup drive and don't need to mess around with usb sticks.

but also that other backup tools work happily on an active /home.

You are probably thinking of tools like timeshift, backintime. These work at the file level. Image backup tools work at the block level - they copy used blocks in a partition, they know nothing about files.

[rossdv8]

Thanks, that's what I thought. I decided 30GB wasn't big enough for Mint's root partition, so I was looking for a way around simply 'copying' about 350GiB from /home to an external drive while I was using the system before doing some gparted magic. In the past, with a couple of hundred MiB it was time consuming and of course - frisky.

In the end I decided I already have enough backups of everything here and there, so I just saved the new bits.
Then I learned all about what not to do when resizing partitions on a 1TB SSD.

Writing an new /root over the old one without formatting it, makes for some interesting games at boot!
You'd reckon in 40 years of computing I would just know this stuff. I'm blaming A G E.

I had planned to hang on until the new Mint update is out of Beta. Anyway, I needed something to do, and interestingly, resizing /home to make room for /root and resizing /root so I can install another 20GiB of software didn't seem to break anything on the SSD and I seem to have all my stuff (so far).

H O W E V E R
I think Foxclone might have made backing up /home (using the bootable USB stick) and restoring it again quicker in the long run, and given me a much safer solution.

[AndyMH]

Think of foxclone (or any other disk imaging tool) as your last ditch defence against failure. For day-to-day backups use a combination of timeshift and backintime (timeshift for the system, backintime for your data). They run from your running system (so no need to boot from a stick), are incremental (only backup what has changed) and you can restore individual files. So more convenient and a lot faster than image backup.

I use timeshift & backintime daily (running automatically), once every few months (when I feel like it), I'll take an image backup with foxclone. If the system drive fails or I screw up really badly, a foxclone restore will get me back a working system. Then a timeshift & backintime restore will get me back to yesterday.

You can resize your / and /home partitions, you just can't do it booting normally (you can't unmount them). Boot either your mint install stick or the foxclone stick and run gparted from them to resize / or /home. I've done it several times, never had a problem, but wise to have an image backup just in case.

[rossdv8]

IN about 2001, just after all the fun with the year 2000 panic, I wrote a script-set for some of the companies I serviced that backed up their Linux servers and their desktop systems 'live' every night. Obviously it could restore a system if needed, but was usually used to build a new 'current' drive on a newly purchased machine.
Originally I tried to set a time when nobody was using the systems, but that was impossible because a couple of them had people coming in and out at weird times at night.

I had to shut all of my businesses down by 2007 after I was the bit that got hit in a Hit and Run accident in 2004, and my injuries made it harder and harder to keep things going.
My customers had got used to running Linux or Xenix on their servers and POS stuff since about 1999, and most had gradually converted to Linux in the desktop by 2005.

It was a pain then when the mob that had to look after my customers when I closed down told them they would have to buy new machines that could run the latest Windows server and desktop software. I got Panic calls at all hours then if they thought Windows was 'broken' and the new guy wouldn't come out and fix it at 3am.

I would love to find a copy of the scripts, although FSA could do a hot backup and restore, and it's probably still around.

[AndyMH]

Same timeframe, running my own company. I had a linux file server (running xandros) serving about a dozen win98 PCs. Backups ran at 2am on a cron job to removable HDDs that were swapped daily. I wrote the backup scripts using DAR (disk archive as opposed to TAR - tape archive). By the time I came back to linux in 2016 xandros was no longer available and DAR wasn't supported.

[rossdv8]

I'm having a quiet chuckle to myself here, because Xandros was the Linux distro I put most of my business customers on for their desktop machines, mostly because it was the easiest I found to transition because of all the Windows look-alikes, Xandros was almost there.

Server end was usually Red Lid, but we had a surprising number of machines running a pre-release Xandros Server edition, before the 2007 version that came out just as I was shutting up shop.

[AndyMH]

I liked it for the reason you outlined - "windows like". I tried a number of distros at the time, can't remember which. I was very much a linux newbie then so it was a gentle introduction. The backup scripts worked. Had a couple of HDD failures, the most we lost was half a day's work. Sold the business in 2004 and that was the end of linux until I had more time on my hands in 2016. First thing I looked for was xandros . Tried all the usual suspects, found mint, the rest is history.

[Drugwash]

Had fun years ago with the chinese Ylmf OS, later renamed to StartOS. Interesting aspect at the time for first versions.

[blueicetwice]

To Image or Clone, that is the question.

https://www.n-able.com/blog/cloning-vs-imaging

Since, I, as a personal user of a computer, making few if any changes
or additions on a weekly bases, the simplicity of cloning rules the day,
for this tech dolt. Under no circumstances would
I clone my wife.

Then on the other hand, with a back-up one could image
several OS's at a time.

The beauty of cloning is if the HDD fails, simply install a new one and allow
Foxclone to do a HDD to HDD transfer. Easier yet and more than likely, if one
nukes their system restoring it with a cloned back-up USB HDD is a snap of
the fingers.

Chilling like a villain - because I am using Foxcloning

[rossdv8]

The beauty of cloning is if the HDD fails, simply install a new one and allow
Foxclone to do a HDD to HDD transfer. Easier yet and more than likely, if one
nukes their system restoring it with a cloned back-up USB HDD is a snap of
the fingers.

We had a couple of cloning tools in the olden days that worked fairly well, but okk forever to do something like 100GB.
I am planning to do a Foxclone of my main drive for exactly the reasons in the quote, and see how long it takes to clone 500GB.
In addition though, because Mint recognises every system I currently use, and finds/boots from my any of my old drives attached via SATA - USB 3 adapters (All are Intel and none have nvidia graphics), I can probably do one clone of the main system and clone back to each of the other Intel systems except the Yoda.

I do still like having a regular folder to folder 'copy' of /home on one external for frequently used files, but that's mainly for just using across systems when I can't be bothered to boot all machines on the network - and honestly, it is clumsy. Almost as dumb as using a USB stick.

Network and Foxclone sounds like a really sensible idea if it is quick enough to clone a 1TB drive these days.

[AndyMH]

Network and Foxclone sounds like a really sensible idea if it is quick enough to clone a 1TB drive these days.

There is no ability to take an image backup to a network share in foxclone - local drives only. I have thought about it, but even with gigabit ethernet it won't be that quick.

[AZgl1800]

when I use Foxclone, it will save an Image in about 45 minutes if the partition is full.
that is to an extUSB spinning HHD

if the SSD is only 35% full of the 500gB partition, it completes in about 25 minutes.

compare that to Macrium Reflect that takes all night long to do the same thing.

[rossdv8]

compare that to Macrium Reflect that takes all night long to do the same thing.

Excellent ! I was wondering. 45 minutes for a mirror image that size meant probably a coupe of hours for a clone of mine,and maybe half as much again to write a new disk.
That's very 'do-able' as a full backup.

I'd better read up on Foxclone's performance doing a differential backup/clone.

[Maxwell-J]

I upgraded from spinners to ssd and had them in removable trays quite some time ago,
all I did was pull the working ssd and insert it into a standalone duplicator and had the cloning done while I slept
had 3 ssds and just rotated them every couple of days ........ worked well

am now down to a HP All-in-one with a spinner with 4 partitions, read 4 OS's and am using Foxclone, it's keeping me operational

in an earlier life I'd used Partition Magic, Ghost, Macrium, all sorts of things ....... no more

[AZgl1800]

I upgraded from spinners to ssd and had them in removable trays quite some time ago,
all I did was pull the working ssd and insert it into a standalone duplicator and had the cloning done while I slept
had 3 ssds and just rotated them every couple of days ........ worked well

am now down to a HP All-in-one with a spinner with 4 partitions, read 4 OS's and am using Foxclone, it's keeping me operational

in an earlier life I'd used Partition Magic, Ghost, Macrium, all sorts of things ....... no more

that works great, providing one has "Removable hardware",
folks like me with a laptop that was engineered to make access to the SSD location a Major Process, taking hours to disassemble the damn thing, don't have that option.

I also have two of the SSD/HHD duplicators, they are a godsend for making backups.
i bought mine to help my son build up some spare laptops for his business.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

For the life of me, I still can't understand why people are cloning to backup their systems and data. Cloning simply takes too long and eats up too much disk space, especially if the system and data are being cloned.

Imaging is better for backing up a system. As long as you are imaging only the system (basically, the OS and programs) and not data, imaging should take only a few minutes of time and not take up much disk space. An added bonus is you can easily store multiple images. Foxclone and Rescuezilla are excellent for imaging. Clonezilla is even better but its unintuitive GUI makes it harder to use safely.

My laptop's boot drive has only 35.4GB of space used (I use a separate boot partition on my notebook since it can hold only one drive). Imaging it takes me less than six minutes total, including set up. Each image is only 16.6GB when using the default compression. Restores take about the same amount of time.

Cloning and imaging are not suitable for backing up data; they simply take too long and requires far too many disk writes. Some kind of folder/file syncing program is faster and takes up less space. When used for backing up data, such a program will essentially create a clone of the data. Since such a program is incremental (it only works with folders and files added, changed, or deleted since the previous update), updating backups is extremely fast when compared to cloning, which has to rewrite every bit on the disk every time. This is especially vital for SSD users to avoid prematurely exhausting write life but still benefits HDD user because of the huge time savings. I use FreeFileSync.

I have the equivalent of three 4TB data drives and one 8TB data drive in my laptop. I update my laptop's data drives daily. Including plugging them in, then safely removing them and putting them away afterwards, update usually take less than a handful of minutes, not hours or even overnight. Just for excrement and merriment, I timed plugging in my laptop's four backup drives and updated all four of them (I set FreeFileSync to do all four with one mouse click), then safely shut them down, unplugged them, and put them away. The whole process took 1 minute and 20 seconds to backup 225MB (the actual backup took only a few seconds). Of course, if I had added more data, say 10GB, it would have taken maybe five minutes or so. Even that isn't so bad because, while FreeFileSync is running, I can still use the computer or go off and do something else, like watch TV, go to the bathroom, or fix a meal.

[rossdv8]

or the life of me, I still can't understand why people are cloning to backup their systems and data.

Mainly, I suspect, so they have a complete OS and data system to build a drive for a new system,or to replace a broken drive on the existing one.
From there it is relatively easy to overwrite the newly installed 'cloned drive' by restoring with the last current backup of the data, using DejaDup or whatever your favourite backup/restore program is. Or your snapshot if that was saved to an external disk.