friendica.eskimo.com
Hey there I am another refugee from windows with the forced push to windows 11. I thought it was time I tried once again linux. So far I am pretty satisfied.
I installed Fedora with KDE and successfully migrated my syncthing server, sftp server. Correctly mounted my nft disks and successfully installed mullvad with all split tunneling I needed.
Now I need advices about 3 things which I sorely miss and which keep forcing me to boot on windows :
- is there any equivalent to macrium reflect, allowing to schedule weekly image backup for system disk. So it could be restored in case something really goes wrong.
My system disk is brtfs. Time machine looks nice but it's not working because I have no @home and @root volume identified. I found explanations which explain how to do it but I am not too sure it's a good idea to do so.
I also found rsync. Didn't explore enough this solution but I am not sure an image backup can be done if system is running ?
- for vscode it's easy and I got it running for my linux environment. Yet I have programs which are meant specifically to run on windows and so I can't develop and test them on linux
- at last for my work I need to be able to use excel. Libre office is not a solution, it's ok for basic usage but it's far behind if you're using it professionally. Please don't turn this about an arguments to say calc is good, really there is something that are just impossible with it. (Like using arrays, power query or data models)
For the last 2 points I feel like my only solution would be to use a virtual machine running windows. Is there a way to run them on it but make it looks like it's a linux app? Somewhat is it what docker is doing but for linux apps ?
Well I feel like I have not many options if I want excel and vscode on windows environment. So sadly I think that will settled it. Please share your thoughts.
I would also really appreciate people sharing what they do to backup their system disk.
Thanks for your advice !
Timeshift is great for getting your system back after a major fuckup. But i dont think it works as a backup solution that can be transplanted to other systems, but i never tried.
I use Kup to backup my important stuff. It comes with a kcm that integrates into KDEs settings menu and can do automated timed backups. Its a wrapper for bup. It also does Incremental backups.
Sounds like you've got a good handle on most of it. FWIW, here's how I deal with some of the same issues:
For Windows apps I've found a virtual machine is the easiest solution. It's set it up to share folders between Linux and the Windows VM so moving things between OS's is easy. I've tried other methods like Wine, and for the Windows apps I need the VM works best by far.
Did you mean Timeshift? (Time Machine is Apple software.) Timeshift works great for incremental backups and is easy to use so you should get it working, but in my case I also do full system backups every few weeks because setting up my systems from scratch is a PITA and really time consuming, especially for my server.
For those full backups I've set up a bootable persistent live USB SSD with Ubuntu. The persistent SSD is fully configured with all software, including VNC, SSH and Clonezilla. Creating a backup requires plugging in the SSD, rebooting and running Clonezilla either locally or remotely. Clonezilla is also also preconfigured so it requires only a few steps to start the backup. Full system backups take about 20-30 minutes to complete but my SSDs aren't that big.
Enjoy your move to Linux. It's well worth the effort.
I haven't found anything that is quite like Macrium. Mostly, because something that works the same way is a bad idea on linux. Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.
Macrium creates restorable images of your entire boot partition or disk, as-is, which can then be restored onto the same, or an entirely different, disk.
This isn't really something you can do in linux, with a system that is live. Hence, partition images should be done offline, when the given partition isn't booted.
That said, everything that matters can be backed up simply by copying the relevant files. For this, I use Kopia.
As for making sure you always have a bootable system, for this I use Timeshift on btrfs.
For MS office, you might try winapps. Sounds like what you're hoping for.
Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration. Hard fork of https://github.com/Fmst...GitHub
Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.
can't it, though?
macrium reflect's normal operation is to run when the ststem is running normally. it creates a volume shadowcopy of your filesystem, and backs that up. a BTRFS/ZFS snapshot is basically what a volume shadowcopy is on windows, but with a less fancy name. if you make a snapshot, you can back that up, either with zfs send, btrfs send, rsync, borg backup, whatever. the difference is that on linux it's not possible to notify programs that a snapshot will happen please sanitize your databases, while windows does that too, so if you restore on linux that's like if your computer crashed because power went off
sure, it can't be done with other filesystems, but OP said they have BTRFS. I think the boot partition can be safely imaged too: remount as read only and make a normal image.
Sure.
But there's no program that just creates a handy partition image. You'll have to get into the weeds of how your filesystem actually works.
Regarding Timeshift on btrfs, is the idea that Timeshift makes it easier to backup to a different disk versus using Snapper?
I'm also on btrfs and miss the wonders of Macrium Reflect. For now, in addition to Snapper, I've been using Clonezilla to make a disk image on occassion. I'm in the process of figuring out something like Vorta to replace that process.
I don't think there's any effective difference between timeshift and snapper. They're both essentially just GUIs for features supported by the underlying btrfs filesystem.
Timeshift backup to another disk, is just rsync.
