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I'm a noob to linux, been using ubuntu for some years but in no way an expert. Usually on my freetime i try stuff and occasionally break the os and then simply reinstall and try again :)

however now I use my ubuntu labtop at work and I'm terrified that I will do something stupid and mess it up.

What I want to do is create a full backup of my current installation into an external hard drive and be able to boot up from it so in the worst case scenario that the entire os shuts down and I am welcomed to a black screen. Then I could simply boot from my backup harddrive and be back from where I left off.

Is there a good tool for this? preferably one with a GUI? I used deja drop but I'm pretty sure that only creates backups that I can go back to from within a working installation. Not a backup I can access if the whole system breaks down. I've also heard about clonezilla but have not managed to find a gui for it.

thanks

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  • I prefer a clean install. And then copy /home over, possible to a separate /home partition. But it depends a lot on whether system is UEFI or BIOS. And you should have full back ups of your data to multiple places anyway. You cannot do an image copy as then you have duplicate UUIDs and cannot have both connected at same time.
    – oldfred
    Mar 30, 2019 at 20:13

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Good night

From what I realized the tool you are looking for is something you can use to save the current state of your computer and if it corrupts you can reverse those actions. Take a look at the timeshift and see if that's what you want.

If your looking for a tool instead to make a snapshot of your user files, I suggest Back In Time or TimeVault

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Clone Hard Drive using dd

One simple but slightly risky method to clone your HDD is by using dd in Terminal.

sudo dd if=/dev/sdx of=/dev/sdy

Where sdx is the drive to be cloned and sdy is the target drive.

dd will do exactly as told so do not make any errors.

The target drive must be at least the size of drive to be cloned.

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  • This is not practical because the whole disk needs to be copied for each backup.
    – Pierre ALBARÈDE
    May 13, 2020 at 15:29

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