I just experienced this over the last couple days.
Both operating systems died on my dual boot system. Long story short they killed each other.
So I switched to my laptop and made a boot disk to try and fix them. To which I discovered my favourite flash drive was acting up.
I searched through my things for about an hour until I found another.
To my horror I discovered massive file system corruption. But, that’s ok I have backups I’ll just install Linux again.
Oh wow, the installer can’t understand that I want to use luks with a filesystem that supports snapshots. And the work around didn’t work anymore.
Many tedious tasks later I’m in the os. Only for an update to fill /boot and kill my system yet again. Also screw you AMD for making your GPU + Rocm package ~20GB post install. (Unrelated but why?!)
After all that I try to get my games going again but this new game I got the DRM screwed me over.
Fine I’ll get windows going again …Only to discover the new windows 11 installer is super buggy and refuses to let me install in any way. (I have multiple drives all tested fine too)
I had to resort to doing a oobe deployment. Finally got into Windows and none of my USB ports work. More effort later I’m in, bypass the Microsoft account nonsense.
While playing my game Razer decides to do a firmware update on my mouse and it goes dead in the middle of some serious PvP action…
During this entire process I also managed to break my phone and my internet went down.
So the lesson from this story is to also backup your operating system(s) have a extra mouse handy and take better notes.
One reason I’m not running Linux on my main box: it’s a fucking nightmare to do a full disk image. I run Macrium Reflect on windows and there is nothing for *nix that I can find that does it easily, and while the system is live. I don’t want to shutdown, find the flash drive, plug it in, boot, image the drive (and my backup drive is encrypted by bitlocker so I’d need to partition the drive and get luks or something…), reboot, and repeat every day and also remember to delete old images.
Yeah sure I can ‘back up’ user data but that’s not the issue, I don’t want to spend a few days getting my system back to the exact config it was before. I already have documents with commands and settings and it’s doable but awful. With windows and macrium I can intentionally fuck the system six ways from Sunday and have it back how it was this morning in 30 minutes. I need that ability on Linux, it baffles me that it’s not a thing.
Look into BTRFS. I’ve been using it for a few months now and it’s awesome. Live disk images with delta changes (saving on consumed space and backup time), even with encrypted drives, and it’s used extensively by Google and Amazon so it will very likely be supported and maintained for a long time to come.
Btrfs is what I run too actually (on a spare ThinkPad) with xubuntu, but the management/scheduling through… TimeShift? Is unreliable. I always need to remember to manually take an image. And I have no idea what the process is if the system is unbootable, since to recover I need to boot and get to TS…
I totally forgot about TS and how btrfs works with it until now. Which tells you how often I manually take an image…
I personally use btrbk with a custom built systemd service and timer. Right now it’s very specific to my infrastructure, but if enough people request it and I have time and opportunity, I’ll post a generic solution here as soon as I can
I just experienced this over the last couple days.
Both operating systems died on my dual boot system. Long story short they killed each other.
So I switched to my laptop and made a boot disk to try and fix them. To which I discovered my favourite flash drive was acting up.
I searched through my things for about an hour until I found another.
To my horror I discovered massive file system corruption. But, that’s ok I have backups I’ll just install Linux again.
Oh wow, the installer can’t understand that I want to use luks with a filesystem that supports snapshots. And the work around didn’t work anymore.
Many tedious tasks later I’m in the os. Only for an update to fill /boot and kill my system yet again. Also screw you AMD for making your GPU + Rocm package ~20GB post install. (Unrelated but why?!)
After all that I try to get my games going again but this new game I got the DRM screwed me over.
Fine I’ll get windows going again …Only to discover the new windows 11 installer is super buggy and refuses to let me install in any way. (I have multiple drives all tested fine too)
I had to resort to doing a oobe deployment. Finally got into Windows and none of my USB ports work. More effort later I’m in, bypass the Microsoft account nonsense.
While playing my game Razer decides to do a firmware update on my mouse and it goes dead in the middle of some serious PvP action…
During this entire process I also managed to break my phone and my internet went down.
So the lesson from this story is to also backup your operating system(s) have a extra mouse handy and take better notes.
:D
One reason I’m not running Linux on my main box: it’s a fucking nightmare to do a full disk image. I run Macrium Reflect on windows and there is nothing for *nix that I can find that does it easily, and while the system is live. I don’t want to shutdown, find the flash drive, plug it in, boot, image the drive (and my backup drive is encrypted by bitlocker so I’d need to partition the drive and get luks or something…), reboot, and repeat every day and also remember to delete old images.
Yeah sure I can ‘back up’ user data but that’s not the issue, I don’t want to spend a few days getting my system back to the exact config it was before. I already have documents with commands and settings and it’s doable but awful. With windows and macrium I can intentionally fuck the system six ways from Sunday and have it back how it was this morning in 30 minutes. I need that ability on Linux, it baffles me that it’s not a thing.
Look into BTRFS. I’ve been using it for a few months now and it’s awesome. Live disk images with delta changes (saving on consumed space and backup time), even with encrypted drives, and it’s used extensively by Google and Amazon so it will very likely be supported and maintained for a long time to come.
Btrfs is what I run too actually (on a spare ThinkPad) with xubuntu, but the management/scheduling through… TimeShift? Is unreliable. I always need to remember to manually take an image. And I have no idea what the process is if the system is unbootable, since to recover I need to boot and get to TS…
I totally forgot about TS and how btrfs works with it until now. Which tells you how often I manually take an image…
I personally use btrbk with a custom built systemd service and timer. Right now it’s very specific to my infrastructure, but if enough people request it and I have time and opportunity, I’ll post a generic solution here as soon as I can