I'm trying to achieve something that would allow me to quickly restore my setup on any computer/laptop, however, I don't have much information about what options I have. AI didn't help me much, seems like my requirements are too specific for it.
I am rather new to Linux and I enjoy experimenting. This comes at a cost of completely bricking my whole system here and there.
I have two operating systems on my laptop: Linux Mint 21.3 and Windows 10. My 450 GB drive is partitioned in the following way:
Code: Select all
AME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda1 vfat FAT32 CEAB-59BC 64,9M 32% /boot/efi
sda2 Microsoft Reserved 16,8M
sda3 ntfs Windows 1CD42404D423DF30 36G 29% /media/shady/1CD42404D423DF30
sda4 ntfs Windows Recovery A84ECC6B4ECC33BA 88,1M 84% /media/shady/A84ECC6B4ECC33BA
sda5 ntfs Userfiles Windows 403CE1943CE1856E 68,1G 1% /media/shady/Userfiles Windows
sda6 ext4 1.0 Linux Home 38dc8b72-b297-4017-a60b-b738b62aa3bd 174,6G 1% /home
sda7 ext4 1.0 Linux Root b315ed2b-7362-4154-87a5-029043cf89db 14,8G 65% /
sr0
/home
or C:\Users
) in both systems (sda5, sda6). And then some other technical partitions (sda1, sda2, sda4). The user files partitions are almost empty.It took me quite some time to partition the disk properly and install both systems and I don't really want to go through that again every time I mess up something.
So, what I'd like to achieve: I have a 64 GB flash disk, that I'd like to use to save a snapshot of my system at this state (both systems installed, setup/customized and working, almost no user files), so the next time I brick my laptop, I can somehow just plug in the flash disk, load the snapshot back into my 450 GB disk and then just fill the user files partitions with my data (saved in cloud) later again.
The problem is that I know how to make bit image using
dd
, but that'll always try to copy the whole user files partitions, including the empty space, meaning that the image will not fit to my 64 GB flash drive. At the same time, I want to save the existence of these two partitions, so I just need to expand them after recovery (or, even better, somehow make them expand automatically to predefined sizes).Is there a way to do this? And if there isn't, what the closest I can get?
Will appreciate any suggestions.