Making Backups before trying changes

[Yora0]

Fedora 17 KDE is not an easy beast to tame, but I chose to endure it because I was specifically looking for an OS that allows me that degree of customization.

However, I think I already made new installations four or five times and while setting everything up again takes less than an hour, it would be nice to be able to avoid that and just return the entire system to a state from before I tried to install graphics drivers, change font rendering, or things like that.

Is there an easy way to make a backup of my whole installation before I start playing around with the settings and restore it when I am not happy with the results or once again destroyed the GUI? Even when it does work, I usually have been through three or four attempted solutions which did not show any visible results, but which probably leave a lot of junk data on the computer every time and may cause complications at later points.

[elias12]

Have a look at Clonezilla

For your home-folder simply copy the Folder on an separate partition/Disk or you give a try to kBackup that you can install from the repository.

[george_toolan]

The easiest way would be Btrfs which supports snapshots. See http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/btrfs-snapshots.html

Unfortunately the file system is still experimental. Try Clonezilla maybe?

[Yora0]

I'll try clonezilla once I have the next clean installation up and customized.

Originally Posted by elias12

For your home-folder simply copy the Folder on an separate partition/Disk or you give a try to kBackup that you can install from the repository.

I've been doing this since I got my first own computer 13 years ago. The guy who set the whole thing up wisely introduced me to such partitioning schemes from the very start. ^^

[elias12]

Originally Posted by Yora0

I'll try clonezilla once I have the next clean installation up and customized.



I've been doing this since I got my first own computer 13 years ago. The guy who set the whole thing up wisely introduced me to such partitioning schemes from the very start. ^^

very well

[Yora0]

So I am now actually playing around with Clonezilla.

And I am confused. The principle of HDD images is known to me and I used GUIs like that before. But this liveUSB Stuff is getting a bit complicated.

I have an USB Hard Drive on which I have a LiveUSB version of Fedora 17 KDE on partition sdb1 and a huge amount of empty space on sdb5, which I thought would be a good place to store Clonezilla. This seems to have worked, but when it came to making images, I did not get a chance to say which of my seven partions I actually want to have backuped. I did get asked where the image should be stored and got four of them listed (Windows, Fedora-root, personal files, and LiveUSB-Fedora, seems about right) but not sdb5 where I actually want the backups to end up at?

I didn't check the Advanced User Mode yet, which in many recent programs happens to be a single window where you can change installation paths, but in this case this might even be what I want.
Or do I actually need another partition on the USB-HDD to store the images?

However, when I started to boot from the LiveUSB Clonezilla partition, I got a LOT of error messages that were not readable. Is that something important or just something Clonezilla always does but does not have any meaning or relevance?