Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

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Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

QUESTION: Did anybody have success using the LM installer to make their partition clones boot and operate normally? If so, how?

______

TLDR PREAMBLE

In anticipation of possible community questions I included a large amount of background information below the line of Mr Green emogis. My comments above Mr Green regard my ongoing frustrations with backing up in LM and other Linux distros. Maybe it will help others, or at least be internally therapeutic to myself.

My summary of rEFInd installation in the last section ("THIS WEEKEND" below the laughing-blushing emogis) is more condensed than anything else I found on the web for rEFInd. It probably should be a separate post, but I found stepwise instructions were relevant to the earlier parts of this post. rEFInd is terrific for those willing to invest the time in setting it up – a pleasant alternative to GRUB, though the two can easily be made to work in tandem. I find it is useful being able to access GRUB features without seeing GRUB at every boot.

Please accept this wall-of-text as positively intended. We are in a moment when LM 22.x is about to be released. Hopefully 22.x may solve more problems than it creates.

______

THE GRIEVANCE

I have ongoing problems reinstalling Linux Mint onto Clonezilla-cloned LM volumes. Other Linux distros generally do not seem to suffer as badly from this inability, or at least I had better success reinstalling the OS on these two: KDE Neon and Manjaro KDE.

The Linux Mint Installation Guide suggests installing onto a preexisting LM root volume may be possible without destroying its data, but I have not had success doing this with recent .ISO installers:
The LM Guide is vague regarding details, and there don’t seem to be any Youtube videos or other links that I found regarding LM reinstallation. I did find an old YT video for Arch installers. Some screenshots in the article would be helpful.

Fom the installation guide:
Warning – This is not recommended for novice users. A misstep during the installation could wipe all your data. Always make backups, make sure to select the right partitions and to carefully review formatting options.”
My Linux Mint challenge boils down to my inability (or ignorance of how) to reinstall the OS from a live .ISO onto a previously cloned Linux Mint installation, while also preserving its home folder, installed apps, installed libraries, root preferences, etc. This type of reinstallation is accomplished with better success in other distros using the Manual Partitioning option – which is located on the installer screen below “Install Alongside,” “Replace a Partition,” and “Erase Disk.”

I don’t see Manual Partitioning as an option in the LM installer. The “Something Else” option does not seem to work quite the same way as the Manual Partition option in other distros, or at least it did not do that for me. Here is what I have been doing so far, which has NOT been working well…

When I go through the “Something Else” pathway, selecting the volume under “Device” list in the “Installation Type” screen, I bring up the “Change” Box and switch the “Use as:” To Ext4 journaling file system, then set the Mount Point to / . I choose the boot loader installation destination and click the “Install Now” button, then I receive a warning box:
Do you want to return to the partitioner? The file system on /dev/nvme01n1p3 assigned to / has not been marked for formatting. Directories containing system files (/etc, /lib, /var, …) that already exist under any defined mountpoint will be deleted during the install. Please ensure that you have backed up any critical data before installing.”
The warnings are legit. I destroyed multiple test volumes.

I realize Linux Mint is geared toward providing a simple front end for beginners and low intermediates, however in this instance (reinstalling the OS over an existing LM volume) the installer is unhelpful in accomplishing what I perceive is a basic end-user-goal: reliable boot volume replication.

I have tried to adjust my thinking to not wanting a reliable pat to boot volume replication, but I simply cannot find a way to think that way after decades being spoiled as a Mac OS customer... and now a spoiled former Mac OS customer.

By contrast, Mac users have taken for granted for decades a reliable OS upgrade-downgrade pathway, within reason, mostly with data preservation. (Yes, Apple messed up my iTunes library with its Music app a few years ago – but that is another story.) Generally when I download a Mac OS installer and run it, my data is preserved – reliably and through decades of OS updates. Some Mac apps may not run under a particular OS, but the user data and apps are still there and, most importantly, the OS actually boots. This experience lies in stark contrast with transitioning through multiple Linux distro versions (or even reinstalling the Linux same version). Sadly LM seems more adversely impacted for me than other Linux distros I tried.

Before people tell me to use TimeShift, BackInTime, Deja-Dup, Grsync, Foxclone, Kbackup, Butterfly Backup, etc – please know I have tried them and found each one lacking in some important ways. Not wanting to throw stones at people who are doing the best software development they can in a free & open source environment (and lacking the coding skills to do it myself) I find the lack of reliable or simple bootable volume preservation solutions to be the Achilles heel of Linux.

TimeShift, BackInTime and grsync all look wonderful before an actual failure happens. The problem is when the user tries to recover his or her data to another volume after a failure and then suddenly realizes the agony of an unbootable destination volume and effectively unusable “backup” data… extremely frustrating.

Deja-Dup (a duplicity wrapper) comes closest so far to providing a workable solution, but I have not yet found a reliable way with it to get my LM volumes back to how I left them prior to planned or inadvertent destruction of my test-environment volume. At best, Deja-Dup / duplicity recovery requires a lot of monkeying around afterward reinstalling libraries by hand, reinstalling apps, manually changing root preference files… many hours of effort if I can even remember how to do it again (fortunately I keep notes.) Too often, Duplicity puts up permissions warnings for components numbering in the hundreds. Those files and folders don’t get transferred, so for all intents and purposes they are lost.

______

THE RANT - please skip unless you want to know why I am writing so much here – perspective of a Mac OS switcher

I am writing candid and frustrated observations after months of experimenting with Linux distros including LM. I hope I do not make an ass of myself in these comments. I am hoping to help others avoid some of the mistakes I made, or at least know what they are getting into. This LM community has been amazing, and the main reason why I keep coming back to Linux Mint.

I want to be able to preserve my user data through time without jumping through so many hoops, but I am not seeing the hoped-for simplicity or reliability of data preservation in LM. While I may find current versions of other distros slightly better in a particular regard to re-installation, none comes close to the elegance of MacOS backup solutions – such as my all-time favorite MacOS rsync wrapper… SuperDuper! Nothing seems to be like it in the Linux world.

My 2012 Mac Mini keeps running like a perpetual motion machine… but its days are numbered. Bloated web design, lack of modern browser support for old Mac OSes, and increasing numbers of apps no longer supporting it leaves this nine year old computer running on borrowed time.

I would like to complete my Mac OS transition into Linux and repurposes the old Mac Mini as a Linux file server, but I need more reliable Linux backup solutions before I can do so. I already wasted a LOT of time reading and trying everything I could think of (and write about it) to get Linux bootable backups to be a reliable process like SuperDuper!, or anything at all that works consistently-and-reliably, month-in-month-out.

Please excuse this TLDR and likely typos. I am working from memory regarding a convoluted seven month Mac-into-Linux journey:


:mrgreen: :roll: :mrgreen: :roll: :mrgreen: :roll: :mrgreen: :roll: :mrgreen: :roll: :mrgreen:

THE HISTORY OF THIS JOURNEY

Background info #1: I am a Mac OS guy since 1985, and Apple ][ owner starting in early 1980. I became disillusioned with Apple’s business model over the past 15-20 years, with their attitude toward Apple customers, with their destruction of the Mac ownership model, and with leadership’s sketchy philosophy involving individual privacy – especially in parts of the world where it is most critically needed (ie, everywhere).

I joined the Linux community in early November after I bought a HP Dev One laptop. It had a Ryzen 7 CPU, a decent screen, a decent trackpad, reasonable gen 3 NVME bus, usb-c 🤮, SK_Hynix 1 TB SSD, 16 GB Samsung RAM, and a decent keyboard with a super key. I upgraded the SK_Hynix to a 2 TB Samsung 970 Ev, which worked reliably without generating excessive heat. I upgraded to 64 GB G-Skill Ripjaws RAM. I installed Linux Mint.

Background #2: The Dev One was an HP Elitebook at a ~ $1000 price in November, with PopOS! preinstalled and no Windows OS. Sadly the Dev One project was axed by HP in January. A lovely machine, it only had a single hardware production run in June, 2022. I have reasonable guesses why HP decided not to continue with a Dev Two… Dev One was a great idea from the buyer’s standpoint but [my conjecture only] it may not have been good for HP’s bottom line. There were probably a bunch of other reasons too.

Background #3: I started my Linux journey a few years ago running Ubuntu in a VM on my Mac, but I quickly abandoned it because it did not do much for me at the time and I was busy. I had some Unix experience in the 1980s - VMS / DEC PDP 11, DEC's shortlived PC, BSD Unix (Mac) then Darwin, but I never became a Unix guru.

Background #4: In November, 2022 I tried PopOS! for about a week before distro hopping, first into Linux Mint, then multi-partition booting into about a dozen other Linux distros. Most distros had one shortcoming or another which made them not worth my time to continue. In the process of distro-hopping, I experienced several wiped volumes, had numerous GRUB issues, hair-pulling over Linux backup methods, black-screen boot, etc. Eventually I learned how to solve most of my booting issues and not destroy my volumes as often. Nothing about it has been particularly life affirming nor life ruining except too much ‘wasted’ time, the famous Linux learning curve.

Background #5: I do not have Widows OS on my current SSD, nor did I ever have Secure Boot. Dev One is a non Windows machine on which I can optionally boot into Windows when I need to update hardware drivers or run Windows only diagnostics. In these situations, I boot from an external SSD using WinToUSB. It makes Windows volumes externally bootable.

Early-2023: I settled on three Linux distros since November-December which I have been running in adjacent partitions, and which I prefer to the others:

(1) LM Cinnamon 21.1
(2) KDE Neon (plasma)
(3) Manjaro KDE (plasma)

I am happy with the plasma development direction and philosophy, and with their software distribution methods. I really like KDE and the Dolphin file browser. Dolphin browser sorta works in LM but it’s kludgy. K apps are easy to add to LM via the repository, but Dolphin browser never fully integrates.

Unfortunately bleeding edge distros such as KDE Neon and Manjaro are fraught with breakage, which is where the updated twice per year LM normally shines.


:oops: :lol: :oops: :lol: :oops: :lol: :oops: :lol: :oops:


THIS WEEKEND:

I installed rEFInd Boot Manager by Roderick W Smith. I won’t go pros/cons of rEFInd because it is another subject, but my installation method was straightforward and I am mostly happy with the results – except for an unworkable Linux Mint after step 7:

(1) Booted into Manjaro KDE from an external volume, I formatted a newly installed 2TB Samsung 970 EVO SSD using the Disks app.

(2) In Gparted I created a GPT partition table on the new SSD (Device > Create Partition Table > gpt). Gparted put up a box – “WARNING: This will ERASE ALL DATA on the ENTIRE DISK.” I clicked OK.

(3) In Gparted I created a 194 mb partition #1 named ESP in fat32 format. This is where EFI data & rEFInd was to be located after step #5.

[Some sources claim 250 mb is necessary, however I believe anything over 150 mb is overkill. After many , Disks app reports my 194 mb ESP partition is only 3.3% occupied.]

(4a) Using Mr. Smith’s instructions and other forum guidance, I installed rEFInd from the terminal.

(4b) In retrospect, I found an easier way to install rEFInd –- using Manjaro’s Add/Remove Software repository, I installed the manjaro-refind-installer package (+) refind-drivers package. I cannot say whether the separate refind-drivers package made a difference but it was small, so who cares?

(5) In the terminal I typed:
$ refind-install
Mr Smith’s scripts took care of the rest.

(6) I rebooted into my Ventoy USB flash drive and installed Manjaro KDE from the 22.1.3-230529 .iso live image onto my new SSD, then booted into the newly installed Manjaro. I updated the OS, installed Disks app, installed Gparted, installed Deja-Dup, rebooted and cleaned things up. I imported my Manjaro KDE backup using Deja-Dup and manually reinstalled a number of other apps that were missing.

(7) I used Clonezilla live .iso (Ventoy USB) to clone my Linux Mint and KDE Neon volumes from the old SSD to the new SSD.

(8) Rebooting back into the new SSD’s Manjaro KDE, I typed in Terminal:
$ sudo update-grub
(9) Repeated attempts to boot into the cloned Linux Mint and KDE Neon from GRUB or from rEFInd on my internal SSD consistently failed. the emergency boot routines were unable to fix problems enough to get to a bootable OS.

(10) I booted back into the Ventoy USB and reinstalled KDE Neon via neon-user-20230602-0716.iso This seemed to work pretty well to bring me a bootable KDE Neon internal volume.

(11) I still have an unbootable Linux Mint clone, which is the main point of this post. Thankfully, I can still boot my original LM volume (slowly over usb-C) on an external SSD.
Last edited by LockBot on Tue Dec 05, 2023 11:00 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Linux Mint user thinking of bailing on LM – a rant with some possibly useful guidance

Post by Mac to Linux »

Buried in that extremely long diary and rant was a plea for help:

Did anybody have success using the LM installer to make their partition clones boot and operate normally? If so, how?
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Re: Linux Mint user thinking of bailing on LM – a rant with some possibly useful guidance on rEFInd

Post by mikeflan »

My Linux Mint challenge boils down to my inability (or ignorance of how) to reinstall the OS from a live .ISO onto a previously cloned Linux Mint installation, while also preserving its home folder, installed apps, installed libraries, root preferences, etc.
I didn't know that was possible. I mean you can do the stuff before the first comma, and then rebuild home, installed apps, etc. But you can't preserve what is there. I wish I could, but I don't even try because I don't have clue how to do that.
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Re: Linux Mint user thinking of bailing on LM – a rant with some possibly useful guidance on rEFInd

Post by motoryzen »

I have ongoing problems reinstalling Linux Mint onto Clonezilla-cloned LM volumes
That statement doesn't make any sense. Why would you install or reinstall Linux Mint...onto/into a Clonezilla-cloned LM volume?

The entire point of Clonezilla or Foxclone is to backup a system be it a system image backup or full disk clone to a separate drive...and then use that backup as the source to target a drive you want to restore your system towards.
My Linux Mint challenge boils down to my inability (or ignorance of how) to reinstall the OS from a live .ISO onto a previously cloned Linux Mint installation, while also preserving its home folder, installed apps, installed libraries, root preferences, etc
If you've already restored your system using a System Image Backup from Foxclone or used the Full Disk Clone restoration option..there is no need to reinstall Linux Mint as doing either of those two backup methods ( if you chose the entire disk like a sane person would ) will restore everything..settings...programs..how they are setup...data...etc.

This is not much different I've noticed then using the two step process clean manually installing/reinstalling LM, and then using Timeshift to restore via its snapshot ( as long as your Timeshift snapshot creation was first set to include the /home folder and all root folders ). I've tested this over 7 times within 8 days ago with LM 21.1 and it worked every time. *shrugs*

Foxclone has never failed me in this regard be it System Image Backup or Restore..method..or the Full Disk Clone backup option or restore in the 2.5 years I've used AndyMH's great software tool.
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Re: Linux Mint user thinking of bailing on LM – a rant with some possibly useful guidance

Post by Moem »

Mac to Linux wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 9:18 pm Buried in that extremely long diary and rant was a plea for help:

Did anybody have success using the LM installer to make their partition clones boot and operate normally? If so, how?
This should have been at the very top. Now people will think the ranting is the point of the thread, and most will stop reading befor they're halfway through; you'll lose most of your possible helpers that way. Also no one cares if you stop using LM... that's fully up to you, we're not a cult.

May I suggest a more descriptive topic title? Such as:
Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?
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If your issue is solved, kindly indicate that by editing the first post in the topic, and adding [SOLVED] to the title. Thanks!
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Re: Linux Mint user thinking of bailing on LM – a rant with some possibly useful guidance on rEFInd

Post by Mac to Linux »

mikeflan wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 9:52 pmI didn't know that was possible. I mean you can do the stuff before the first comma, and then rebuild home, installed apps, etc. But you can't preserve what is there. I wish I could, but I don't even try because I don't have clue how to do that.
The point of my long message was, don't waste your time cloning a LM volume to another physical storage volume using Clonezilla, Foxclone, RescueZilla, or command line tools such as PartClone or rsync. Any hope you may have of booting from that newly cloned Linux Mint volume will likely end in disappointment. I tried several different cloning methods -- all failures. Though the Linux kernel tries hard to fix broken components, I am guessing there are too many symbolic links or other broken dependencies that cannot be repaired by Emergency Boot.

For whatever reason, with some other Linux distros it sorta-works, some of the time. Not saying I recommend a clone-then-reinstall method with any Linux distro, as there remains a lot of manual cleanup to be done afterward. The files may be there but the linkages are broken, so you end up reinstalling a lot of stuff by hand even on a cloned backup. In other words, it's not much of an improvement vs restoring from an archive. OTOH, if your backup archive is nonfunctional, then it might be worth a last-ditch try before losing all your data. At least with two non-LM distros, there's a fighting chance you'll be able to recover something versus a total data loss with LM.

________

NEW EXPERIMENT THIS MORNING: Thinking that the 6/2022 "Vanessa" edition Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.0 .ISO installer (which is available per the LM All Versions web page) may not be compatible for reinstalling over my internal SSD's 21.1 Cinnamon clone (ie, fresh Clonezilla image from my functional external SSD onto my internal SSD partition), I tried running the LM "Vera" .ISO bootable 21.1 Mate installer on my 21.1 Cinnamon clone -- with the same :( results.

[Unfortunately, the LM 21.1 "Vera" Cinnamon .ISO live boot installer goes black-screen whenever I run it, so that is not an option for me. I am not the only person who has the black-screen during startup of the 21.1 "Vera" Cinnamon installer. It just doesn't work on my hardware.]

:twisted: :( :twisted: :( :twisted: :( :twisted: :( :twisted:

As I wrote in my long OP, the best so-called "data backup" option I found so far is Deja-Dup, but it only reliably backs up the Home folder... so it's not a true "backup" in the way I think of a backup. If you try adding anything besides the Home folder to the Deja-Dup archive, it fails with permissions problems.

A critical component of a working-and-bootable Linux partition are the libraries (what average PC users may consider GUI apps + their dependencies) that exist outside the Home folder. None of that gets archived by Deja-Dup, TimeShift, BackInTime, etc. If you try adding other directories, you're asking for trouble -- a seriously corrupted volume.
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Linux Mint — Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

Moem wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 2:56 am
Mac to Linux wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 9:18 pm Buried in that extremely long diary and rant was a plea for help:

Did anybody have success using the LM installer to make their partition clones boot and operate normally? If so, how?
This should have been at the very top. Now people will think the ranting is the point of the thread, and most will stop reading befor they're halfway through; you'll lose most of your possible helpers that way. Also no one cares if you stop using LM... that's fully up to you, we're not a cult.

May I suggest a more descriptive topic title? Such as:
Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?
Thank you for this feedback — edits gratefully accepted.

Linux Mint forums are the best on the web because they are constructive rather than mud slinging. Obviously there are a lot of learners here, each of us trying to solve problems or learn from others. These forums are the main reason why I keep coming back to LM. The OS itself is great. Lots of people are working really hard, and it shows.

My rant was not intended to discourage people from trying the cloned OS overwrite method, but to have realistic expectations. Also, people may find this thread on a web search and identify solutions for various distros and projects, for instance installing rEFINnd.

I will try LM 21.2 "Victoria" (or whatever official number is) when it goes live this month. I am not optimistic Victoria's installer will successfully overwrite partition clones as I have been trying, but one never knows?
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Moem »

Mac to Linux wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 1:46 pm Linux Mint forums are the best on the web because they are constructive rather than mud slinging. Obviously there are a lot of learners here, each of us trying to solve problems or learn from others. These forums are the main reason why I keep coming back to LM.
That's good to hear, it's what we strive for.
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If your issue is solved, kindly indicate that by editing the first post in the topic, and adding [SOLVED] to the title. Thanks!
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Linux Mint – Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

motoryzen wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 10:57 pm
I have ongoing problems reinstalling Linux Mint onto Clonezilla-cloned LM volumes
That statement doesn't make any sense. Why would you install or reinstall Linux Mint...onto/into a Clonezilla-cloned LM volume?

The entire point of Clonezilla or Foxclone is to backup a system be it a system image backup or full disk clone to a separate drive...and then use that backup as the source to target a drive you want to restore your system towards.
The issue following this weekend (probably not well enough stated in my OP) is that I have recently been cloning from a working 2TB MSDOS-mapped SSD onto a newly formatted 2TB GPT-mapped SSD, with reFIND occupying partition 1 of the new SSD. A full disk clone would have wiped out new partition 1. Individual volume cloning "seemed" to work, but the volumes were unbootable. Running the .ISO Linux installers got me a bootable state on two distros, but my Linux Mint partition remains broken and unbootable.

I am not sure if GPT mapping created unique problems. I had difficulties getting individual clones to boot even on a MSDOS mapped SSD. It's what I experienced, not what "should have been."

Not sure I understand your second paragraph regarding a two-step cloning process versus a direct SSD-to-SSD clone? I am trying to understand your point, not misconstrue the meaning. Wouldn't a direct drive-to-drive clone be more likely to succeed, versus putting another physical volume in the middle :?:
If you've already restored your system using a System Image Backup from Foxclone or used the Full Disk Clone restoration option..there is no need to reinstall Linux Mint as doing either of those two backup methods ( if you chose the entire disk like a sane person would ) will restore everything..settings...programs..how they are setup...data...etc.

Foxclone has never failed me in this regard be it System Image Backup or Restore..method..or the Full Disk Clone backup option or restore in the 2.5 years I've used AndyMH's great software tool.
The reason I am going to extreme measures is because my Linux partitions failed to boot — with the exception of a single MSDOS mapped partition 2 to another MSDOS partition 2 copy — and that one had a lot of problems which needed cleaning up in Emergency Boot. I never fully trusted the cloned volume 2, and rightly so — it eventually became unbootable and unfixable by any means I tried.

AndyMH is an awesome contributor. I read his PDF book which boosted my understanding — but obviously I am still learning.

Foxclone is a great tool for the right job, but I don't think it allows cloning (say) from SSD #1 volume 3, to SSD #2 volume 5. Both volumes need to be identically located and equally sized on their respective SSDs. I admit my understanding of Foxclone may not be 100% complete. I spent a fair amount of time using Foxclone but it is a complicated app.

I especially appreciate that Andy included Gparted and gnome Disks on his live .ISO — very useful tools! I wish the Linux distro installers had them in live boot. Though Gparted and Disks can be downloaded in live boot each time, it's time consuming and the downloads doesn't "stick" from one boot to the next. How much faster opening Foxclone ISO to run Gparted or Disks when nothing else works. Thanks so much, Andy!
This is not much different I've noticed then using the two step process clean manually installing/reinstalling LM, and then using Timeshift to restore via its snapshot ( as long as your Timeshift snapshot creation was first set to include the /home folder and all root folders ). I've tested this over 7 times within 8 days ago with LM 21.1 and it worked every time. *shrugs*
We must be doing something differently, or our data is different. I have pretty clean Linux installations with a few apps and a few installer packages, but nothing much else. I tried using TimeShift several times on various different Linux distros to include root folders and all I got were permissions problems and unbootable volumes.

If it works reliably for you, then I am happy. Successful recovery with TimeShift has not been my experience at all. I must be doing something wrong, but if so, what?

Do you have any idea what I might be doing wrong with TimeShift? It seems like a pretty straightforward UI. Not sure how anyone could mess it up? Other than using sudo to install apps and libraries, I am not screwing around in root permissions.

Your message gives me renewed hope regarding TimeShift. Maybe something became corrupted in my archives? Though I cleaned out my TimeShift archives several times and restarted fresh, it was NO BOOT situation each time I restored to another physical SSD... so I eventually disabled TimeShift archiving and moved on to other methods. I will start experimenting with TimeShift again, but without knowing what I might have done wrong?...

It just shouldn't be this hard. Seven months on-and-off futzing with this backup project, versus getting other things done. I feel like a monkey pulling levers and hoping something "works."

Many other people would have given up on Linux, quietly licked their wounds and gone back to a big-name OS. I don't want to give up on Linux if I can avoid it, but at some point this feels like doubling down on a bad bet. I am not expecting sympathy or feeling huge remorse. It's been educational. At some point, though, I would like to move beyond struggling with Linux backup methodology into something more life affirming.
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

Moem wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 1:56 pm
Mac to Linux wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 1:46 pm Linux Mint forums are the best on the web because they are constructive rather than mud slinging. Obviously there are a lot of learners here, each of us trying to solve problems or learn from others. These forums are the main reason why I keep coming back to LM.
That's good to hear, it's what we strive for.
Even in its glory days, I don't know the Mac OS was ever as tight online as the Linux Mint community. In the early 1990s lots of communities had active Mac User Groups (MUG) with regular meetings, summer cookouts and other non-computer activities.

Where's my medium-well burger? :mrgreen:
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Re: Linux Mint – Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by AndyMH »

Mac to Linux wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 3:19 pm AndyMH is an awesome contributor. I read his PDF book which boosted my understanding — but obviously I am still learning.

Foxclone is a great tool for the right job, but I don't think it allows cloning (say) from SSD #1 volume 3, to SSD #2 volume 5. Both volumes need to be identically located and equally sized on their respective SSDs. I admit my understanding of Foxclone may not be 100% complete. I spent a fair amount of time using Foxclone but it is a complicated app.

I especially appreciate that Andy included Gparted and gnome Disks on his live .ISO — very useful tools! I wish the Linux distro installers had them in live boot. Though Gparted and Disks can be downloaded in live boot each time, it's time consuming and the downloads doesn't "stick" from one boot to the next. How much faster opening Foxclone ISO to run Gparted or Disks when nothing else works. Thanks so much, Andy!
Correct, you cannot clone a single partition on one drive to another partition on another drive, not what it was intended for. But you can with gparted, more below.

gparted and disks (which I don't like and hardly ever use, prefer gparted) are on most distro isos. You will find gparted on your mint install stick.

Re-installing and keeping your data - have a separate home partition. I've always had one. That way when you do a fresh install*, you use the "something else" install tell the installer to reformat your / partition and use it for / and use your existing home partition for /home and NOT reformat it. That way you keep all your configs and data, you still have to re-install your software. Mint can help there with the mint backup tool (don't have much time for it, but this is one area where it is useful). You can save your "software selection", it creates a text file listing the software you have installed (think the default location is Documents, so copy to an external drive). You can restore this, but one major drawback, it will only restore software from the standard repos, no foreign packages. I have a lot of those, so no good for me, so I wrote my own script to take a vanilla install and set it up as I need it. Personal to me, so only useful to others in terms of general principles.

I don't think the installer's partitioning tool is very good (this is the screen after selecting "something else"), so if I am installing to a brand new drive, I partition it with gparted first before installing.

On the "more below". I recently got a new computer (well new to me), second-hand thinkcentre. Normally I would just clone one of my laptops with foxclone, but no good, my laptops are legacy boot and I wanted to switch to UEFI boot on the thinkcentre. foxclone can't do that. I also wanted all the data in the home partition on the laptop (well over 300GB). What I did - I took a spare 1TB usb HDD and used gparted to copy the home partition on the laptop to it. Formatted the drive in the thinkcentre with an EFI and an ext4 partition for / using gparted. Then used gparted to copy the home partition onto the drive in the thinkcentre from the usb HDD. Did a "something else" install and told it to use the home partition I had copied as /home and not reformat it. Kept all my configs, tweaks to the desktop and data. Still had to re-install all my software.

A week ago, I swapped out the 512GB nvme drive in the thinkcentre with a 1TB nvme drive. I used foxclone to clone the old drive - straightforward, and when finished used gparted to resize /home to use the additional space.

While it's a while (LM19.1) since I had to use timeshift in anger, I have not had problems with it. Bit intimidating first time you use it. If you know you haven't screwed up grub then tell it to leave the bootloader alone. Just looking as I write this, it looks as though it has my bootloader options wrong - it would re-install grub to the drive (MBR), but this is a UEFI boot and it should have picked the EFI partition??
working 2TB MSDOS-mapped SSD onto a newly formatted 2TB GPT-mapped SSD... but the volumes were unbootable
Yes they would be, if you were still booting legacy on the GPT drive you would need a bios_grub partition, if booting UEFI on the GPT drive you would need an EFI partition and in both cases you would need to install grub manually. Unfortunately part of the learning process which dependent on what you are trying to do can be steep :( . I've been using mint full time for over seven years, I'm still learning - there is more about linux I don't know than there is the stuff I do know.


* the general recommendation if you are making a major version change, e.g. LM21 to LM22 (whenever it comes out). There is an upgrade tool and it is getting better, but a major limitation - no foreign packages, and I can't see that changing, simply too difficult.
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by mikeflan »

The point of my long message was, don't waste your time cloning a LM volume to another physical storage volume using Clonezilla, Foxclone, RescueZilla, or command line tools such as PartClone or rsync. Any hope you may have of booting from that newly cloned Linux Mint volume will likely end in disappointment.
When you say "LM volume", you mean a single partition. There are gurus who can image a partition to another drive, fix the grub or UEFI or whatever, and get it to boot. I am not that guru. I stick to whole disk imaging, because it is very likely to work. It always worked when all my computers where legacy, but now that some are UEFI even that does not always work :(
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by motoryzen »

were unbootable
I wonder if it's the fact those partitions were GPT and not MBR?? I apologize if that sounds ignorant or in left field.
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by linux-rox »

Mac to Linux wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 8:34 pm QUESTION: Did anybody have success using the LM installer to make their partition clones boot and operate normally? If so, how?
I'll say again what has been said by others. Neither Clonezilla nor the Mint Installer are intended to be used this way. If you use Clonezilla as designed, the restored system boots fine. Used to be my primary backup tool, years ago, and I tested thoroughly before relying on it.

Maybe I missed it, but have you looked at rsync? That's what I use now, for both data and system backup. There's a learning curve, of course, but it has been around for a long time and is very well documented. Be aware, other tools are needed for a complete backup plan, e.g., grub-install and tune2fs, and it's up to the user to put the pieces together in a way which fits his or her particular situation.

One thing I do, and think you want to also, is create a data partition. It's similar to the home partition strategy Andy mentions, but better suited to a multi-boot system. More easily shared and simplifies backup considerably.
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Re: Linux Mint – Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

AndyMH wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 6:46 pm
Mac to Linux wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 3:19 pm AndyMH is an awesome contributor. I read his PDF book which boosted my understanding — but obviously I am still learning.

Foxclone is a great tool for the right job, but I don't think it allows cloning (say) from SSD #1 volume 3, to SSD #2 volume 5. Both volumes need to be identically located and equally sized on their respective SSDs. I admit my understanding of Foxclone may not be 100% complete. I spent a fair amount of time using Foxclone but it is a complicated app.

I especially appreciate that Andy included Gparted and gnome Disks on his live .ISO — very useful tools! I wish the Linux distro installers had them in live boot. Though Gparted and Disks can be downloaded in live boot each time, it's time consuming and the downloads doesn't "stick" from one boot to the next. How much faster opening Foxclone ISO to run Gparted or Disks when nothing else works. Thanks so much, Andy!
Correct, you cannot clone a single partition on one drive to another partition on another drive, not what it was intended for. But you can with gparted, more below.

gparted and disks (which I don't like and hardly ever use, prefer gparted) are on most distro isos. You will find gparted on your mint install stick.

Re-installing and keeping your data - have a separate home partition. I've always had one. That way when you do a fresh install*, you use the "something else" install tell the installer to reformat your / partition and use it for / and use your existing home partition for /home and NOT reformat it. That way you keep all your configs and data, you still have to re-install your software. Mint can help there with the mint backup tool (don't have much time for it, but this is one area where it is useful). You can save your "software selection", it creates a text file listing the software you have installed (think the default location is Documents, so copy to an external drive). You can restore this, but one major drawback, it will only restore software from the standard repos, no foreign packages. I have a lot of those, so no good for me, so I wrote my own script to take a vanilla install and set it up as I need it. Personal to me, so only useful to others in terms of general principles.

I don't think the installer's partitioning tool is very good (this is the screen after selecting "something else"), so if I am installing to a brand new drive, I partition it with gparted first before installing.

On the "more below". I recently got a new computer (well new to me), second-hand thinkcentre. Normally I would just clone one of my laptops with foxclone, but no good, my laptops are legacy boot and I wanted to switch to UEFI boot on the thinkcentre. foxclone can't do that. I also wanted all the data in the home partition on the laptop (well over 300GB). What I did - I took a spare 1TB usb HDD and used gparted to copy the home partition on the laptop to it. Formatted the drive in the thinkcentre with an EFI and an ext4 partition for / using gparted. Then used gparted to copy the home partition onto the drive in the thinkcentre from the usb HDD. Did a "something else" install and told it to use the home partition I had copied as /home and not reformat it. Kept all my configs, tweaks to the desktop and data. Still had to re-install all my software.

A week ago, I swapped out the 512GB nvme drive in the thinkcentre with a 1TB nvme drive. I used foxclone to clone the old drive - straightforward, and when finished used gparted to resize /home to use the additional space.

While it's a while (LM19.1) since I had to use timeshift in anger, I have not had problems with it. Bit intimidating first time you use it. If you know you haven't screwed up grub then tell it to leave the bootloader alone. Just looking as I write this, it looks as though it has my bootloader options wrong - it would re-install grub to the drive (MBR), but this is a UEFI boot and it should have picked the EFI partition??
working 2TB MSDOS-mapped SSD onto a newly formatted 2TB GPT-mapped SSD... but the volumes were unbootable
Yes they would be, if you were still booting legacy on the GPT drive you would need a bios_grub partition, if booting UEFI on the GPT drive you would need an EFI partition and in both cases you would need to install grub manually. Unfortunately part of the learning process which dependent on what you are trying to do can be steep :( . I've been using mint full time for over seven years, I'm still learning - there is more about linux I don't know than there is the stuff I do know.


* the general recommendation if you are making a major version change, e.g. LM21 to LM22 (whenever it comes out). There is an upgrade tool and it is getting better, but a major limitation - no foreign packages, and I can't see that changing, simply too difficult.
Checking back in after several days due to LM Forums being down for renovation, and a local internet service provider outage. I deeply appreciate all the wisdom shared here, and the empathy and a little comiseration.

I am now experiencing better results with TimeShift since I (accidentally the first time last week) began telling TimeShift in the Restore Snapshot screen to:
  • (1) keep /boot/efi on the root device
    (2) keep /boot on the root device
    (3) keep /home on the root device.
#1 was counterintuitive at first, as I had a separate GRUB partition 1 on my old SSD, and rEFInd on my new SSD's partition 1. That partition has its own /boot/efi folder which I did not want overwritten. I had been directing /boot/efi to partition 1 (with bad results), and to empty partitions (also with bad results). Directing TimeShift to put everything on the root device got me a bootably restored Manjaro partition — hooray! — however my Home folder was empty.

I read TeeJee's TimeShift user's manual several times and somehow I did not see that suggestion of putting everything on the root device. In retrospect was a forehead-slaping Homer Simpson moment: "Doh!"

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

In the above document TeeJee compares TimeShift to Windows System Restore and to Mac OS Time Machine. I disagree with the Time Machine comparison. Time Machine allows the user to restore their drive file-by-file (pick and choose), folder-by-folder, or restore the entire system back to any archived date-time. In fairness TeeJee elaborates:
Timeshift is similar to applications like rsnapshot, BackInTime and TimeVault but with different goals. It is designed to protect only system files and settings. User files such as documents, pictures and music are excluded. This ensures that your files remains unchanged when you restore your system to an earlier date. If you need a tool to backup your documents and files please take a look at the excellent BackInTime application which is more configurable and provides options for saving user files.
I used BackInTime quite a few times in November-December before abandoning it due to poor recovery results. Deja-Dup (aka Backups) appears to be suited to Home Folder recovery, but it has its own quirks and gotchas.

Here is another useful quote from TeeJee's TimeShift manual:
User Data is Excluded by Default

Timeshift is designed to protect system files and settings. It is NOT a backup tool and is not meant to protect user data. Entire contents of users' home directories are excluded by default. This has two advantages:

You don't need to worry about your documents getting overwritten when you restore a previous snapshot to recover the system.
Your music and video collection in your home directory will not waste space on the backup device.
Having reinstalled GRUB now over a hundred times via different methods and different distros, I am reasonably comfortable editing GRUB's config file at /etc/default/grub and reinstalling it. That said, I am exceptionally pleased not to have to deal with GRUB ever again (I hope) now that rEFInd is working reliably. There is a learning curve with rEFInd, but having a customized bootloader menu with my personalized graphics (including a a favorite photo backdrop with my phone number for lost-and-found) and custom boot options is phenomenal. rEFInd integrates memtest beautifully. I wish there was a way to load Gparted directly via rEFInd, but I did not find a way to do that yet.

I played with the rsync command line briefly, and that deserves a second look someday when I am not too busy.

Your points about NO FOREIGN PACKAGES with major OS updates is highly salient. This is also an issue in Mac OS X and presumably in Windows OS. Rolling distros such as the Arch variants and KDE Neon appear to have the edge here, but at a cost of decreased stability and an additional learning curve. That said, I am reasonably happy with the rolling distros –- except, I have not succeeded in getting AI frontends (for instance oobabooga) to compile "wheels" in them. Open source AI is one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Linux Mint.

With the community's support I am getting much closer to a comfortable Linux backup solution, but it's still time consuming to restore volumes and test them. Here is my future time-savings strategy...

I just ordered a MAIWO K3015P Portable Dual Bay M.2 NVME docking station / NVME M.2 cloner. The K3015P tops out at 2TB NNVME cards, so it will not be a backup solution for 4 and 8 TB cards once those become more affordable. 2TB is the sweet spot for me now, but cloning 2TB over USB-C is painful. A standalone cloner should be much faster, and offer better heat dissipation with a small household fan, versus my laptop and external enclosures. Crossing fingers the MAIWO cloner is reliable. Their cheaper models have a reputation for burning out quickly, but this one supposedly has a better quality power supply.
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

mikeflan wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 9:04 pm
The point of my long message was, don't waste your time cloning a LM volume to another physical storage volume using Clonezilla, Foxclone, RescueZilla, or command line tools such as PartClone or rsync. Any hope you may have of booting from that newly cloned Linux Mint volume will likely end in disappointment.
When you say "LM volume", you mean a single partition. There are gurus who can image a partition to another drive, fix the grub or UEFI or whatever, and get it to boot. I am not that guru. I stick to whole disk imaging, because it is very likely to work. It always worked when all my computers where legacy, but now that some are UEFI even that does not always work :(
You are correct. I occasionally revert to saying "volume" when I mean partition. We both know partitions can hold more than one volume, but not in my case.

I am hopeful that my external NVME SSD cloner will get me identical clones. That is its only job. Of course doing so will eat away at SSD lifespans more quickly, but that is the cost of data preservation.
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

linux-rox wrote: Tue Jun 06, 2023 11:21 pm
Mac to Linux wrote: Mon Jun 05, 2023 8:34 pm QUESTION: Did anybody have success using the LM installer to make their partition clones boot and operate normally? If so, how?
I'll say again what has been said by others. Neither Clonezilla nor the Mint Installer are intended to be used this way. If you use Clonezilla as designed, the restored system boots fine. Used to be my primary backup tool, years ago, and I tested thoroughly before relying on it.

Maybe I missed it, but have you looked at rsync? That's what I use now, for both data and system backup. There's a learning curve, of course, but it has been around for a long time and is very well documented. Be aware, other tools are needed for a complete backup plan, e.g., grub-install and tune2fs, and it's up to the user to put the pieces together in a way which fits his or her particular situation.

One thing I do, and think you want to also, is create a data partition. It's similar to the home partition strategy Andy mentions, but better suited to a multi-boot system. More easily shared and simplifies backup considerably.
I use a separate data partition for my large files such as AI weights (9+ gb per file), for downloads, and for TimeShift and Deja-Dup archives. The Home folder is only for localized data.

I did try rsync briefly. My understanding is grsync and duplicity call rsync to do the heavy lifting. TimeShift and DejaDup are GUI wrappers which (hopefully) reduce the human error component to some degree. It's easy to screw up a flag or a digit in a long command line.

I noticed your mention of UUID issues (and how to resolve them) in another thread titled Possible to use previous made timeshift after a clean install?" I was going to comment in that thread before it closed, but LM forums went down for maintenance. Do you have any additional thoughts about avoiding UUID conflicts with restored volumes onto clean installs, or onto "dirty" installs on other partitions?
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Mac to Linux »

A quick follow up regarding the MAIWO NVME SSD m.2 external hardware cloner, model K3015P. It works like a charmed 🍀 to a leprechaun. The K3015P cloned my 2TB Samsung 970EVO to an identical 970EVO in 28.5 minutes... no muss, no fuss. As a byte-level cloner, I doubt it cares what's on the SSD. I confirmed it works with EXT4 volumes. I expect the same to be true for BTRFS, but I did not test that.

I recently ordered two inexpensive 4TB NVME SSDs (not yet arrived) to use with my Mac. My understanding is the K3015P box will NOT clone SSDs larger than 2 TB, but I will test it anyway.

I am posting this follow up as a possible solution to people who may be struggling with Linux backups, as I was, or who just want to be more time efficient. I find 28 minutes satisfactory for a full SSD clone — definitely preferable to cloning over USB 3.1.

I will continue using Deja-Dup and BackInTime for sequential backups. I may selectively use Linux volume cloning tools such as FoxClone or Clonezilla for single partition needs cloning.

Follow-up #2: I remain satisfied with rEFInd boot manager, though I may experiment with Refind Plus at a future date. It supposedly fixes old bugs in rEFInd.

I am not sure if this thread is ready for closure yet. Let's leave it open a few weeks in case anybody else cares to jump in and ask questions, if Mods are OK with that?
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by SMG »

Mac to Linux wrote: Tue Jun 27, 2023 11:12 amI am not sure if this thread is ready for closure yet. Let's leave it open a few weeks in case anybody else cares to jump in and ask questions, if Mods are OK with that?
This is your support topic for your specific question. You get to decide if it is solved and change the title to mark it as such.

The automated system will lock the topic six months after its creation date unless you request the topic to be locked prior to then.
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Re: Linux Mint - Can I use the installer to make partition clones work?

Post by Reddog1 »

Late to the party, but to the OP:

Are you aware that you can use VirtualBox to install a macOS version that your computer does not support? For example, if your old mini 2012 has at least 16GB of ram, at least Monterey will run just fine on it (with 12GB of ram allotted to the VM), using a linux Mint host.

You will need to jump through some hoops to get it going, but if you have Apple hardware you are not violating the Apple terms of service, and it works really well--not quite the same as an iron install, but very close.
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