Foxclone - linux image backup, restore & clone

[AndyMH]

I can confirm the problem with the foxclone v40 deb. Will post again when fixed.

EDIT - fixed, simple error on my part.

[Dumfy]

Hi

I'm slowly moving away from Windows to Linux and like both Mint 20 and openSuse Leap 15.2 (just recently installed these new versions). As I couldn't decide between the latter, I've installed both along with Windows so it's a triple boot set up.

After each install & prior to installing the next OS, I used Foxclone to back up each. So now the OS's are installed with a Foxclone image of each.

My question is about restoring one of them - or all - when things go wrong and what to select with respect to restoring the partition table? If I borked Mint for example, can I just restore the Foxclone Mint image only, but what about the partition table option? Similarly if I need to restore Windows / Suse.

Should I have created an image of the whole drive with everything on it? That to me seemed over the top as I'd have to restore all three OS's if only one is borked.

I also use Timeshift daily and Suse takes it's own snapshots as well.

Hope I've explained it all clearly? In a nutshell I guess is what to do with the partition tables during any restore.

Many thanks in advance

[AndyMH]

Personally I'd take a backup of the whole drive. You can restore individual partitions from that, with a BIG BUT...

If and only if you have made no changes to any of the partitions (size or position on the drive), you can restore an individual partition. So if you borked your mint installation you could just restore your / partition and leave windows alone (and your /home partition if you have one).

If you have made any changes to partition sizes or locations since the backup, foxclone will detect that the partition table has changed and insist on restoring it. If you then only restore one partition, the partition table is going to point at the wrong place on the drive for the partitions you changed since the backup (and thus screw up your system).

I left the option to select individual partitions on a restore in because once you have setup your system, it's not often that you would change any of the partitions. If you do - take another backup.

While I developed foxclone, treat it as your last line of defence. On the linux side, your first line should be file level backups such as timeshift, backintime, luckybackup. With these you can be selective about what to restore at the file level. Utilities like foxclone or clonezilla give you no choice - you have to restore the entire partition or drive.

[Dumfy]

Hi Andy,

Many thanks for your reply and I take your points.

Now I'm set up the way I was hoping for, it's highly unlikely I'll be making changes to any of the partitions at all. I'll use Foxclone to image the whole drive and will bear the caveat in mind.

I'll take a look at backintime and luckybackup too. I also notice that Mint comes with it's own back up tool and assume it's the same as the others?

Thanks again

Dumfy

[AndyMH]

I also notice that Mint comes with it's own back up tool and assume it's the same as the others?

No, it's very limited, all it does is create a compressed archive (.tar.gz) of whatever you have selected to backup. Luckybackup and backintime are more sophisticated. I use backintime, 'out of the box' it defaults to backing up /home, nothing else (timeshift is there to look after the system - backs up / excluding /home = complimentary). First time you use it, it will backup everything in home, next time it only backs up what is new or changed (so much quicker). So you get a history. You can selectively restore individual files or folders, or the whole lot.

[bob466]

Hi Andy,

I did a clean install of Cinnamon 20 on a new 500GB SSD and created
an Image that looks like this with Foxclone 40.2...https://ibb.co/BwLdM6y why so many folders. Cinnamon 19.1 looks like this...https://ibb.co/C9cnhPH

However Foxclone restored the Image of Cinnamon 20 just fine. Maybe it's just the way Foxclone sees Cinnamon 20...this is how it appears in the Disk Manager...https://ibb.co/cv8W3xK looks very different to Cinnamon 19.1 and I only have one Partition on the Drive too.

As Cinnamon 19.1 works just fine and is supported till 2023...I have no intention of moving to Cinnamon 20 just yet...took a while to find this thread...just like my Macruim Tutorial which has been kicked to the back of the bus.

Also with Foxclone 40.2 at start-up I get this "Warning- unable to get serial number for sda". I click "OK" twice to get...Reading Drives. I don't care about serial numbers...as long as it works.

[AndyMH]

why so many folders

Because you get one image file plus log file per partition and you have two partitions in your LM20 install. looking at your other screenshots you seem to have managed to get a franken-install of LM20:

• You've got a legacy partition table (you have an extended partition), but...

• You have an EFI partition (from the disks screenshot) = UEFI install. At least that's what I'm assuming sda1 is - you can check with gparted (are the esp & boot flags set on sda1?).

So it looks like you previously installed 19.1 in legacy mode and then installed LM20 in UEFI mode (check your BIOS settings).

From memory, the default install for mint on a legacy partition table is to create one primary partition (in your case the EFI partition) and then put the rest in an extended partition.

Serial numbers - up to foxclone40, I used the drive model name as the unique identifier for a drive. Then realised that if someone had two identical drives in a system it could cause a problem. So in foxclone40 it uses model name and serial number as the identifier. It uses hdparm to get the S/N (or nvme for nvme drives). USB sticks don't have a serial number, so when you booted foxclone what was in sda?

The hdparm command is sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdX which is then grepped to get the S/N.

[bob466]

why so many folders

Because you get one image file plus log file per partition and you have two partitions in your LM20 install. looking at your other screenshots you seem to have managed to get a franken-install of LM20:

• You've got a legacy partition table (you have an extended partition), but...

• You have an EFI partition (from the disks screenshot) = UEFI install. At least that's what I'm assuming sda1 is - you can check with gparted (are the esp & boot flags set on sda1?).

So it looks like you previously installed 19.1 in legacy mode and then installed LM20 in UEFI mode (check your BIOS settings).

From memory, the default install for mint on a legacy partition table is to create one primary partition (in your case the EFI partition) and then put the rest in an extended partition.

Serial numbers - up to foxclone40, I used the drive model name as the unique identifier for a drive. Then realised that if someone had two identical drives in a system it could cause a problem. So in foxclone40 it uses model name and serial number as the identifier. It uses hdparm to get the S/N (or nvme for nvme drives). USB sticks don't have a serial number, so when you booted foxclone what was in sda?

The hdparm command is sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdX which is then grepped to get the S/N.

Both Cinnamon 19.1 and Cinnamon 20 were created exactly the same way...NO Partitions on the same computer with 500GB SSDs.

Yet Cinnamon 20 creates phantom Partitions..The problem is with Mint.

How can you have two 465GB Partitions on a 500GB Drive. what am I missing here.
As for Serial numbers...if someone is stupid enough to create an Image or restore it with more than one Drive connected then that's their problem.

[AndyMH]

How can you have two 465GB Partitions on a 500GB Drive. Image what am I missing here.

Because sda2 is an extended partition with a logical partition sda5 inside it.

MBR drives have a four primary partition limit, to get round this they invented the extended partition, so you have have three primary partitions and one extended partition. Inside the extended partition you can have as many logical partitions as you want. In essence the extended partition entry in the main partition table is just pointing to another partition table that contains details on the logical partitions.

if someone is stupid enough to create an Image or restore it with more than one Drive connected then that's their problem

I do it all the time, multiple drives in all my PCs. Foxclone decides where to put a restore, not the user - trying to make it as idiot proof as possible. Hence the need for some unique identifier for a drive.

[Noto]

Hi, I'm trying to use Foxclone.
Downloaded the ISO and burned to a USB.
Checked the md5sum and it is OK.
But I reboot in the Foxclone OS, and cannot launch the app.
Here is the errors:

Screenshot from 2020-07-19 12-55-20.png (14.21 KiB) Viewed 1622 times

Code: Select all

To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ foxclone -d
** procedure constructor TMainFm.Create
** ---------------
** procedure InitialSettings
** ---------------
** function GetVersion
** ---------------
** procedure termCmd
** CmdLine =uname -r 
** ---------------
** procedure TMainFm.CreateBackupPage
** ---------------
** procedure TMainFm.CreateRestorePage
** ---------------
** procedure TMainFm.CreateClonePage
** ---------------
** function GetVersion
** ---------------
** procedure termCmd
** CmdLine =uname -r 
** ---------------
** procedure TMainFm.ReadDrives
** Activated =false
** ---------------
** procedure parted
** ---------------
** procedure termCmd
** CmdLine =pkexec parted -ls
** ---------------
Model: ATA APPLE SSD TS128C (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 121GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start   End    Size   File system  Name                  Flags
 1      1049kB  538MB  537MB  fat32        EFI System Partition  boot, esp
 2      538MB   121GB  121GB                                     lvm


Model: hp v165w (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 16.1GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags: 

Model: Verbatim STORE N GO (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 31.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: unknown
Disk Flags: 

Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/mint--vg-root: 120GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End    Size   File system  Flags
 1      0.00B  120GB  120GB  ext4


Model: Linux device-mapper (linear) (dm)
Disk /dev/mapper/mint--vg-swap_1: 1028MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: loop
Disk Flags: 

Number  Start  End     Size    File system     Flags
 1      0.00B  1028MB  1028MB  linux-swap(v1)


** end parted output---------------
** function SizeInKB
** sizestr =537MB
** ---------------
** function SizeInKB
** sizestr =121GB
** ---------------
The program 'foxclone40' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)'.
  (Details: serial 2757 error_code 3 request_code 12 minor_code 0)
  (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
   that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
   To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
   option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
   backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ 

Hope we can help each other!

[AndyMH]

You have a logical volume (lvm) on sda, is it an encrypted install?

From what you are saying foxclone is crashing?

Tell me how you set up your system and I'll see if I can replicate it. The warning window you are seeing is a test I put in to check that a drive has a valid partition table (gpt or msdos) - the disks program will let you create a partition on a drive without a partition table.

[Noto]

Sorry, I'm sure there was something wrong with my system.
I made a clean install.
It worked perfect, made a backup of my almost perfect settled HD.
Thanks a lot for your time developing this tool.

[Nuts2u]

I'm trying to download the iso from the website....but the iso is only 182k in size not 600mb as stated. Can you look into this? I would really like to check out your program.

Thanks

[AndyMH]

I agree there is a problem, just tried on my main laptop, hung a long time but did download foxcloneV40 at around 600MB. Then went to another laptop and tried chromium, vivaldi and firefox, all showed a foxcloneV39 download (which doesn't exist on the website anymore) and downloaded a file 184 bytes in size.

I'll be back.

[Nuts2u]

Just downloaded foxclone40-02.iso from the website size 591MB. Flashing a usb stick now to test it out.

[yekim54]

Tried earlier but the download just hung; maybe I didn't wait long enough for it to start. Glad to see it's working again. My downloaded foxclone40-02.iso file size is 564MB.

Also, the manual file name is foxcloneV12.pdf, but the PDF page header says V40.

[AndyMH]

Version 12 of the guide relating to foxclone V40.

[AndyMH]

In case anybody else has a similar problem, this is what you should see on the download page:

The current version of foxclone is V40. If you see something different try:

• reloading the page, or if that fails

• flushing the cache in your browser and try again.

[Moonstone Man]

Screenshot from 2020-07-31 13-38-44.png

That warning needs work. If you're not supposed to install it on your computer, what are you actually supposed to do with it?

[AndyMH]

That warning needs work. If you're not supposed to install it on your computer, what are you actually supposed to do with it?

Sorry, not understood. Did you look at the "click here for more info" which provides more on how to use the deb?