Successful backup of dual boot system with Foxclone!

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Daisuke
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Successful backup of dual boot system with Foxclone!

Post by Daisuke »

After many months of preparation, I was finally able to put Phase 1 of my backup plan into practice. Sincere thanks to the many Minters who provided good information and advice. Without their generous help, I could never have got this far.

My dual boot system has Windows 10 on an NVME M.2 device and Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.2 on a Samsung Evo 860 SSD.

The first step was to use Foxclone to create a disk image file for each system drive. Next each disk image file was cloned to its new drive using Foxclone v 50-06. The cloning method was Foxclone's DiskImage to Drive. Windows went to another NVME M.2 device and Linux Mint to another Samsung SSD (870 EVO). Foxclone was very easy to use, the easiest part of the entire process in fact, especially because of the excellent User's Guide provided by Andy MH. And as it turned out, I did not have to use gparted at all because Foxclone sized the partitions as they were in the original devices even though the amount of used space was smaller than any of the partitions.

The hardest part was the HW hassle to test everything. Windows 10 would not boot from a USB device. To clone Windows, I put the target NVME SSD into a Sabrent EC-SNVE M.2 to USB 3.1 Gen 2 case with an Anker *A8486011) USB-C to USB-C cable. The cable which comes with the Sabrent case is too short to be of much use, but the case itself was great. There was very little heat generated during the cloning process. Grub is actually on the Windows drive and the cloned grub worked fine. From grub I could boot right into the original Linux SSD, but Windows just failed utterly. I had already had to remove the original NVME from the M.2 slot in order to run the test (you cannot have two storage devices with identical UUIDs in a system), so it was not hard to put the cloned device into the M.2 port and test it. This made Windows happy so that drive was set.

Next up Linux. I disconnected the power and data cable from the original Linux SSD (to have it out of harm's way and to be ready to test the clone). Then I put the new SSD target device into a dual bay OWC Drive Dock which supports two SATA SSDs with independent power but a shared USB 3.1 Gen 2 connector. After cloning the DiskImage to the drive with Foxclone, the Linux Mint clone booted from the grub menu which had no problems starting Linux on the USB. In fact, I am writing this on the clone!

The total time to create the Disk Images and to run the clones was about70 minutes. I did not use compression. By far, setting up for the tests was where I spent most of an afternoon. Of course, I had a steep learning curve too.

So Phase 1 is a success. Now on to Phase 2 which involves running TimeShift, BackInTime and FreeFileSync as well as adding a 4TB drive to hold these backups and putting my Blu-Ray box in an external case to free up an internal SATA port.

Here are two diagrams that I used to help me in formulating my backup plan.
Storage Requirements for Backing Up This System
Storage Requirements for Backing Up This System
Diagram of Backup System
Diagram of Backup System
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
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BrunoMiranda
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Re: Successful backup of dual boot system with Foxclone!

Post by BrunoMiranda »

Many thanks for the reference on Freefilesync!
I'll check it out later and it can be the solution to efficiently mirror my 2 backup hard drives.
Up to now I've tried rsync but it is too slow, and a simple copy (cp) skipping existing files, which is fast but fails in updating modified and deleted files, meaning every once in a while I'd have to wipe the secondary hard drive and make a full copy of the primary one into it.

By the way, for Linux OS partition cloning of your Operating System and restore it in an emergency, I've been using fsarchiver for years and it has never failed me.
I have a Mint bootable USB with the fsarchiver .deb file and the backup images. If anything happens (usually me breaking a system, my fault), I boot from USB, eventually move some personal data to another partition and restore the system image in a couple of minutes.
Its only caveat is that it doesn't backup the boot sector, so if you install a different kernel than the one on your backup you will need to reinstall grub - and that's more complicated and takes longer than the restore itself - but there's a GUI that offers the option for boot sector backup and restore.

Also, important since you also use Windows, fsarchiver can work with NTFS but it is not recommended, I believe it's not stable enough to guarantee a backup and restore without errors, and that's kind of important...
Let me know if you need some hints with it.

Hint: Use compression on your backups. A light compression for testing purposes as the time spent compressing data can save time from the file writing process (not sure about it in modern NMVEs), and I use the heaviest compression for storing long term backups, the long slow compression time gives me gains on file storage saving and time saved when I want to copy that file to another external drive, over the network or a very slow USB thumb drive. Remember you might need to restore in an emergency under a ticking clock!
For example, my OSs, without personal data, are around 8GBs, and they compress to a file under 3! Restoring them is lightning fast on a NMVE! (basically the time for it to read the 3GBs, the 8 cores CPU decompress the data, and writes back on the drive the 8GB [with the 10s of thousands of files and structures]).
Bye for now,
Bruno


(Always backup before you screw up :)
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Daisuke
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Re: Successful backup of dual boot system with Foxclone!

Post by Daisuke »

BrunoMiranda wrote:Many thanks for the reference on Freefilesync!
I owe that tip to another Minter, @Lady Fitzgerald! It can be used as a mirror or instead in so-called update mode which allows you to preserve files on the destination which were deleted from the source. It also allows you to preserve versions of modified files up to a specified depth. So it is fairly flexible. You can have several profiles or methods to use for different purposes and/or different backups. Backing up backups will be Phase 3 of my backup plan!
BrunoMiranda wrote:Its (fsarchiver's) only caveat is that it doesn't backup the boot sector,
Foxclone does back up the boot sector if you clone the entire drive. The documentation is very clear and easy to follow and it worked flawlessly.
BrunoMiranda wrote:Hint: Use compression on your backups.
Thanks for pointing this out. On the maiden voyage, I wanted to keep processing to a minimum to eliminate it as a possible source of errors. But now that I know that the overall process works well, I will take your hint since you have convinced me it is the better option.
BrunoMiranda
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Re: Successful backup of dual boot system with Foxclone!

Post by BrunoMiranda »

Hi @Daisuke.
It's been some time but I'd like to thank you again for FreeFileSync. Used it to mirror my 2 HDDs and it works like a charm. It has now been incorporated into my backup routine.
What a magnificent piece of software! Way overkill for my needs but it is very very able and versatile, it's the copy-one-size-fits-all tool!
And its installation is dead easy: you download a Linux universal .run file, it installed fine on Mint.

Foxclone does back up the boot sector if you clone the entire drive.
I don't backup my entire drive, only my operating system partition (and I should study more about that EUFI crappy partition on the drive as it is critical, although it can be rebuilt).
This usually implies updating GRUB, and eventually reinstall it. Takes more time and headache than the restore operation itself, but I very very rarely need to restore. So far Mint has been able to resist my heavy hammering with minor repairing. (and usually, if it broke, that was me... :mrgreen: )

I'm happy with this backup method because I only install one OS on one machine and then I'm able to restore it into another machine, even with different hardware (except 32bits CPUs but I've retired those old computers, or arm.). This means I can have the very same exact computer experience on a lot of different computers.
Try doing this on Windows... (there AOMEI backup software allows "universal backups" and it works, but you can't do it with the official Microsoft tools).

Hint: Use compression on your backups.

Thanks for pointing this out. On the maiden voyage, I wanted to keep processing to a minimum to eliminate it as a possible source of errors. But now that I know that the overall process works well, I will take your hint since you have convinced me it is the better option.
Compression algorithms are old beaten tested software with their reliability more than assured.
And, apart from that, a good compression software verifies its backups for reliability - and that's my main complaint about fsarchiver because it doesn't! :shock: (although it has failed me zero times).
But for that, if I wanted to, I could "compress" (with no compression as it is already compressed) my fsarchiver backup file with WinRAR (it works fine with WINE) and add it's magnificent Recovery Record option (I usually use 1% (it gives you redundancy for 1% failure on all file with the caveat of increasing the file size 1%).
For a backup file that's more than enough should the media fail somewhat, and having just 1% protection or 100% or even none makes absolutely no difference in case of a major HDD or SSD fail...
Bye for now,
Bruno


(Always backup before you screw up :)
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