System backup or system image help

Framework Laptop 13
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I finally have my framework just how I want it to be as a starting point. I am would like to back it up, or create a system image of it’s current working state. That way, if something goes wrong, at least I can start fresh from here. I am currently only using around 6gb. I tried clonezilla, but it wanted 1tb of space, to match the drive as a whole.

What would be the best route to do this? Thank you!

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For windows, you can use macrium reflect, For linux there are some brtfs tools available.

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I personally use LVM snapshots + dd/dcfldd. It’s saved my bacon quite a few times when I completely hosed my root fs.

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Sorry, I forgot to say that I am using fedora 35’s kde spin as my os.

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Yeah, so then either BTRFS-type stuff or regular old LVM snapshots will work.

For LVM snapshots:

Leave some free space in your volume group and then run sudo lvcreate -L"${LVSIZE}" -s -n "${SNAPNAME}" "${SNAPSOURCE}", where "${LVSIZE}" is the size of the snapshot volume (which should be equal to or smaller than the amount of free space in the volume group), "${SNAPNAME}" is the name of the snapshot volume (I tend to use “RootSnapshot” because I take snapshots of only my root partition), and "${SNAPSOURCE}" is the path to the source logical volume (in my case, this ends up being /dev/Crypto/Root since I create LVM inside an encrypted container). Then, you can do something like sudo dcfldd if=/dev/${SNAPGRP}/${SNAPNAME} of=/path/to/backup/snapshot/image bs=4M, where ${SNAPGRP} is the volume group of the snapshot volume (so Crypto above) and ${SNAPNAME} is as above, to save an image of a logical volume to your backup volume (in my case, I mount my external hard drive to /media/sdb1 or such, so /path/to/backup/snapshot/image would be /media/sdb1/snapshot.img).

I know it looks complicated, but it’s all of 2 commands that you can throw into your backup script and it should “Just Work”. I know that recovery works (by using dd/dcfldd in the opposite direction to restore the snapshot) because I’ve used this method to undo stupid things I’ve done (without having to reinstall).

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