Personally I haven’t. While Linux is imperfect, choosing the right distro makes the rest of the experience straightforward. And with it’s whole complexity, I find Linux more user friendly than Windows. Even driver issues, broken shadow file ownership and KDE specifics only made me more confident about my choice to use Linux after I solved everything.
OK, I want to be helpful. Are you trying to back up the entire disk? Like Clone one drive to a file or another drive?
Or are you wanting to create backups of the data and user information?
First, thank you for trying.
There’s what I want and there’s what I’m trying to do. 😉
Waving my magic wand, I’d like a bootable backup of my laptop’s internal hard drive. This is what SuperDuper does. I would like it to be straightforward: I issue one command, then I can boot from the external hard disk to which I have backed up. For bonus points, restore is merely backup in the other direction.
That is what I’d like.
I’m cloning a drive with Clonezilla and tomorrow I’ll try to boot to the backup drive. I would like to understand how restore works, but frankly, I’m not optimistic and I’m not currently eager to risk screwing up my laptop’s internal hard disk.
If you do disk to disk clone, you will make an exact copy of the source disk to the destination disk.
BEWARE of booting from usb when the source drive is installed as well!
A modern OS uses UUID’s (identifiers) to manage the hard drives. You are effectively creating a drive and partitions with the SAME UUIDS in the USB drive AND the local drive.
There are steps to manage this, but understand it could cause you issues. A simple way to manage that is make sure to simply disconnect the internal drive in the bios when you boot from USB.
OR
Boot normally, and add a virtual machine to the host and run your USB drive inside the host VM.
Also, there are some good videos (from other people) on using clonezilla on their webpage, I know one of them talks about identifying the disks and walks you thought the process of making the clones and restores if that helps any.
Thank you for the warning. This is exactly the kind of thing that makes this not at all just as easy as creating a bootable backup of a Mac! And it’s the kind of thing that makes “this is easy” difficult to take seriously.
Now I know what to search for and I will probably be able to piece it together.