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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

The real lesson from this is that you pretty much never actually want a full disk backup.

Why would you copy over all the operating system files and partition scheme when you can instead do a clean install and clone over your home directory? It in nearly all cases takes much less time and is much cleaner.

If I had to, though, the first tool I would reach for would be `dd`...which the author never does, because it's too archaic, unlike those fancy GUI programs that don't work?

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Because it's reinstalling all the apps that actually takes time.

Yes, hopefully you put all the Really Important Stuff in your home or somewhere else where it can be trivially copied (and backed up...) - including your favorite editor, all your configuration files, and any other tools you can't live without.

But then you remember that you recently added a new tool to your workflow, a really shiny package, but one which also required installing approximately 1300 dependencies and for some reason a kernel driver. It took you a solid week to get running properly, and you've long forgotten all the hoops you had to jump through to do it.

This is why I thank my lucky stars that I use a rolling release distro. Configuration is in my home folder, and my system is no more than a list of packages or PKGBUILDs.

Which is actually very similar to what Microsoft are doing with Windows 10. The OS and "apps" are all "rolling" in that sense with the list of packages stored on some MS server. Not exactly the same as something like Arch and it only works for store apps but it is a step in the right way I guess.

To keep all the applications, OS modifications, hardening, config, etc. When I used Windows, I used one partition for OS/apps and one for data. I backed up the data in a straight-forward, file-level way. Did the other partition as a whole with Acronis. Periodically restored from clean state, did updates, backed that up. So whole system was always one restore away with critical data available with secondary box until that finished.

"If I had to, though, the first tool I would reach for would be `dd`...which the author never does, because it's too archaic, unlike those fancy GUI programs that don't work?"

dd, Gparted... not sure what old stuff like Acronis or Ghost do on modern hardware. I use non-SSD disks on older laptops and servers so I'm not sure. On Linux past few years, I just backup key files and clean-slate install when I have problems because a reinstall/re-config is quicker than a differential backup on a Windows box. :)

These days dd is the only thing I trust for disk cloning.

I was planning to dust it off and try it on a bunch of disks with different configurations. This thread was a nice reminder. Windows might even benefit from a port of DD to its boot disks with a GUI.

> you pretty much never actually want a full disk backup

I pretty much want a full disk backup all the time:

- when I buy a new laptop that comes with a non-SSD hard disk that I immediately upgrade to an SSD, saving hundred of $$ compared to buying a laptop with an SSD

- when I upgrade / change the drive of my home PC

- when I backup the boot drives of said laptops and home PC in order to have an instant swap-in clone in case of hard disk failure.

If you upgrade a new laptop immediately, why would you need backup?

"Well, there’s always booting into Linux and doing the old DD if=something of=something bs=somethingbig and then maybe hex-edit the partition tables after it runs off the end of the source drive. This is my wife’s computer and she’s worth it. For kicks, I look at what partition tables have mutated into. They were a miserable hack back in the early 80s, and time has not improved them. I wince and close that web page."

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