Copied system partitions to USB disk, how to proceed to make a clone?

[Bo Berglund]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2021 20:56:07 +1100, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:

>On Mon, 2021-10-25 at 10:08 +0200, Bo Berglund wrote:
>> How can I back up the *entire* disk from Ubuntu 20.04 desktop running
>> on that same disk? Some partitions are locked...
>
>What does "locked" mean - encrypted?

No, it means that the partition is showed in GParted as being mounted and
therefore not possible to modify. GParted shows a key image on the partition
display.
Such partitions might be possible to copy anyway but since disk content is
probably changing during copy the procedure is risky at best.

>Assuming you have a disk big enough to copy it to, take an image copy
>to a USB3-connected external disk. Safest to do the image copy to a
>file on the external disk rather than to the raw disk. Or copy it to
>network-connected storage somewhere. "dd" is your dangerous but
>powerful friend :-)

The backup disk is a 1TB USB connected disk, which houses copies of partitions
from the original server I have migrated. But it is 500 GB free and the
partitions I need to back up are basically the system partition and the swap
partition, which are just 30 GB total, 50% used.
I have done that now, but what I really wanted to do is copy the *complete set*
of partitions on the source so they could be used as an emergency restore
source.

>
>> What I want is a full clone of *all* of the partitions so I can (in
>> theory) restore the full content after the server had been release-
>> upgraded to 20.04.3
>
>I can see no way to test this without buying an identical disk to the
>one you now have, restoring your backup image to it, swapping it for
>the one now in the machine, and seeing if it boots.

This is probably not possible (or rather difficult), the new PC has a 500 GB SSD
disk which I believe is very securely mounted inside. It is one of these longish
circuit board type disk modules.


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden