this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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I am supposing this will not work - simply using dd to copy the booted disk /dev/sda for example to a file on an external hard drive. This would not be a good back as too many system file would be missed. right?

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[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Right. You can't get a correct image of rw mounted filesystem.

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Is there an easy way to create a very minimal linux that runs out of memory or that would live in a very small partition, that would be capable mainly of dd ing the working partition to a file on a USB?

[–] waspentalive@lemmy.one 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

OH - what about one of the many bootable install ISOs and Ventoy?

[–] Oisteink@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

You can boot off usb stick. Or grab a copy of clonezilla and boot off that memory stick with all the tools you’d want for drive or partition copy/restore

[–] piefedderatedd@piefed.social 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Indeed. Clonezilla is cool but comes with a considerable learning curve and lots of text to read. Rescuezilla, based on Clonezilla, is easier.

[–] marathon@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 months ago

thanks for this, hadn't heard of Rescuezilla before. I'll have to take it for a spin.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de -1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

I think it's good enough. Shut down as many services as possible if you want to be safer. In the end it would just be like booting after a power failure.

[–] bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do you have experience of restoring such a backup?

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 0 points 7 months ago

Yeah, didn't have any problems. But maybe I just got lucky.

[–] KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

it would just be like booting after a power failure.

That level of confidence is EXACTLY what I want when I'm restoring a backup.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 points 4 months ago

The difference being that it should just be writing log files and nothing important.