Apart from dd you can also go for Clonezilla or Rescuezilla. Both not super user friendly but once you get familiar with it makes backups and restore easy and fast for data and boot-loader.
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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I used to do this frequently "back in the day"....
dd will create a complete bit-for-bit copy of the drive and put its contents into a file. All the way down to the boot sector, partitions, etc. Filesystem doesn't even matter a little.
I used to do something like "dd /dev/sda bs=1M | nc remote.server 1234" and then on the remote server "nc -l 1234 -p > file.img </dev/null". I was swapping back and forth between Linux and Windows on a work laptop that I was using for non-work related things on the weekend, at conferences, etc.
Wasn't perhaps my most intelligent moment, but it worked!
The file you create using the dd command is just a file. It can live on any filesystem capable of storing a 256 GB file.
Make sure that you compare the checksum between the drive and the file and store a copy of it with the file, so you can check it after restoring the data.
Note that you can even mount that file using a loopback interface, so you can read the content, but if you alter it, the checksum will change.
Welcome to Linux where all manner of magic is built-in.
Great, I didn't know that you can make a checksum of a drive. Thanks.
Pretty much everything on Linux is a "file", which is a metaphor used throughout the operating system.
It's possible because block devices can be read just like files (except often the permission differences)
you can use the sha256sum command to do this. there are a few siblings of it with different algs. gui tools also existof course
No, a dd image is just a raw stream of bits. It doesn't care about filesystems, neither inside nor outside the file.
You 100% want to use Clonezilla for this job. It should be on everyone's Ventoy stick.
What are the pros of using Clonezilla instead of dd, in terms of simplicity the command that I wrote it's hard to beat.
Backups only used blocks. Backup to or from various locations, NFS shares, ftp, WebDAV, ssh server, samba, etc. Encryption of the images, backup of single partitions or whole disks.
If you want to deploy to several machines at once it also has a load of tools for that too.
As others have said, using dd will be a bit for bit copy of the drive, regardless of the filesystem. If you were only using 10GB, and the rest of the drive was "empty", the output of dd will still be a 256GB file. You could compress this file with gzip if storage is a concern.
With regard to your plan with Windows, there is a hardware check that OS will perform and if the hardware drifts too much, the OS will not be activated anymore and will need a new license. I'm not familiar with recent versions of Windows, but if you have a Pro version of the OS, it might not work on new hardware.
The idea is to restore Windows to the same laptop in case I want to sell it, so it shouldn't have any issues, right?
Ah I see ok yeah that should be fine. I misread and thought you were going to sell the windows laptop and transfer the OS to a new machine.
You can just reinstall base Windows at that time, either plain or your OEM version if they provide it. There's not much use in preserving the current image.
there are. for one because of the license key, but also because it's not rare that its hard to find all the drivers that make all of the laptop work
OEM license keys have been stored in the BIOS for several versions now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Locked_Pre-installation
For 99% of drivers, the on-disc ones are enough to get up and running, and as long as you have an Internet connection you can download any that aren't on-disc. The remaining 1% can be obtained directly from the OEM. Modem Windows is very good about this.
For 99% of drivers, the on-disc ones
op will wipe the disk
as long as you have an Internet connection you can download any that aren't on-disc
if windows update can guess correctly what kind of device you have
The remaining 1% can be obtained directly from the OEM
I did not have that experience last time with an acer laptop