No. You don't understand what clone means. It creates an identical copy of the source drive on the destination drive. It is an exact copy of the source, same partition table, same partitions. It doesn't matter what you do with the 1TB drive beforehand because it will get overwritten. Clone is for when you want to swap out your main drive for another drive, e.g. smaller to larger drive or swapping an HDD for an SSD. You do a clone and replace the old drive with new and just boot it.I am intending to use the iso on a DVD and to clone my set up, which is on my laptop's 500 Gb HDD. I have a 1 tetrabyte usb HDD and I would like to have the clone on one ~500 Gb element and a backup of /home on the other ~500 Gb portion.
What you want to do is backup. This creates compressed image files of the source on the destination and you can put the image files wherever you want.
I have 1TB or 2TB removable HDDs in all my PCs and used solely for backup, setup as follows:
This is what the backup drive looks like in gparted:
- a large ext4 partition where all my backups are stored - for backintime, timeshift and foxclone.
- a small ext4 partition (shows as 20GiB, but 10GiB is big enough). This has LM19.3 installed in it. Why - so that I can boot from the backup drive without needing a separate usb stick with foxclone on it (or in your case a DVD) = much simpler and quicker. This is shown at the end of the drive - it doesn't matter where it is, I put it at the end because the large partition already existed and to create a new partition at the beginning of the drive would have meant moving many GB of data (all my other backups) = a long time.
If you do this with gparted, the partitions will be owned by root (so it will be read only). Foxclone runs as root so doesn't care, but if you want to be able to save other stuff to it, in a terminal
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /media/you/mylabel (a good reason for labeling partitions, otherwise it would mount using the UUID = not user friendly). If you use disks to create the partitions, don't think you get this ownership problem (I don't use disks).Now install mint to the usb HDD. I chose LM19.3 simply to distinguish it from the main system (all running either LM19.0 or LM20.0), doesn't matter, pick the one you want. Choose the 'something else' option and on the next screen select the small partition on the usb HDD (probably sdb1 if you created the small one first) and click on the change button, tell it to use it for
/. At the bottom of the screen is a drop down where you tell it where to put the bootloader. It will probably be saying sda (your main system drive), you don't want this. Select sdb (your usb HDD). We want this so that you can independently boot the usb drive if your main drive dies. Install mint...Reboot and at the manufacturers splash screen press the key that brings up the BIOS boot list (this is F12 on my thinkpads, F11 on my desktop, yours may be different). Select the usb drive and boot it.
Download the foxclone deb file from the website. Install it as you would any other deb file (double click on it in your file manager). You now have a usb HDD you can independently boot with foxclone installed in it without having to have a separate DVD. You can also install any other utilities (like gparted) into the version of mint on the usb HDD and set it up how you want.
When you boot your main system again, if you want, you can open a terminal and
sudo update-grub (usb HDD must be plugged in), mint will find the version of mint on the usb and add it to the list. Next time you boot you will be given the choice of the main system or the usb HDD - makes it easier to boot for routine backups, don't need to go into BIOS. You don't have to do this.You don't need a second partition. You now have one large partition for your backups and can save different backups in different folders. This is what my backup partition looks like on one of my T430's:Firstly, How do I prepare the 1 Tb usb HDD to accept the clone to the first partition and have a second partition for periodic /home back up?
Secondly, can I periodically backup /home to the second partition using Foxclone (I am not certain that Foxclone can select a specific folder for back up) or the Backups app (I’m not certain if Backups can save to a specific partition).
The first backup you do must be a full backup, i.e. all partitions. Thereafter, you can periodically backup just your home partition* as long as you don't make any changes to the partitions (size or position). I made a mistake recently playing with LM20. Made a full backup of LM19.0 (/ and /home partitions) before I installed LM20. Told mint to reformat / but leave /home unchanged. Then wanted to revert to LM19.0. Tried to restore just the / partition. Foxclone told me the partition table had changed and insisted on restoring it. I ended up with a system that wouldn't boot and had to do a full restore of LM19.0 (/ and /home). The installer had deleted and re-created the / partition when it installed LM20 = changed partition table.
EDIT - * to be honest, there is not much point just backing up /home. /home is likely to be several times bigger than / and take correspondingly longer to backup. You might as well just backup everything each time - you will probably be adding a few minutes to the backup time and a few GB to the backup size. If you look at the file manager screenshot, the image for / is 7GB (sdc1), the image file for /home is 90GB (sdc2).
