Strategy to backup and reinstall everything

Dear all,

I was curious and formatted my NVMe drive as btrfs, because I wanted to give it a try. A few weeks later, I already had one event of file system failure, and I’m somewhat unsure about it. In short: I’d rather reformat everything if I had a way to avoid the careful system setup.

Could you think of a way to create a full backup, reformat the drive and put the contents back into place? Ending up with everything as it was, but on ext4 instead btrfs? External drive space is available.

And help is greatly appreciated. Regards

Christian

I don’t understand the last part.


Many backup programs should be able to do that: Synchronization and backup programs - ArchWiki

A few notes if you want to backup and restore everything, including the system:

  • You may want to do that from a separate system or a LiveUSB, in order not to override the binaries currently being used when restoring.
  • AFAIK, reformatting will change your partition’s UUID. After restoring, you will need to apply the new UUID into the mount configurations, such as /etc/fstab.

Use a ghosting/cloning usb system such as Clonezilla. It’s a bit late for that now though.

I don’t understand the last part.

I could easily backup/restore my home dir. But I’d also like to re-install all packages, and keep my config changes, eg. for GDM, sysctl, GRUB and others.