Here is how to easily create a bootable clone of your Fedora system disk

Ask Fedora
1

Did you know that you can use Balena Etcher to create a bootable clone of your system disk? Balena Etcher is as easy to use as MacOS Carbon Copy Cloner application. Cloning the system disk is the best way to avoid having to install the entire system and restore the backup in case of hardware failure or software issues.

Here is what you’ll need:

  • Fedora Linux Live bootable USB key
  • external disk >= the disk you use for your system clone
  1. Boot Fedora Linux Live
  2. Download Balena Etcher application image
    ( balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives )
  3. Clone your system disk to your external disk

In my case it looks like this:

1
13272×2124 129 KB

2
23268×2120 202 KB

3
33248×2112 113 KB

4
43252×2116 173 KB

5
53260×2128 127 KB

Balena creates EFI and Boot partitions as well, so you can boot from your cloned partition.

6
63592×2392 286 KB

Enjoy :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Really interesting! I wonder if this wouldnt also just work using dd.

lsblk 
#show your drive and the drive you want to use

udisksctl mount /dev/DRIVENAME
#mounts drive to /run/media/$USER/drivename

sudo dd if=/dev/YOURDRIVE of=/dev/DESTINATIONDRIVE bs=64K status=progress
#clones your entire drive

Balena etcher is only available as Appimage, uses Electron, shows ads etc. The preinstalled utilities are really great!

Btw udisksctl is way better than mount in many cases.

1 Like
3

I usually use an rsync shell script which also assigns a new UUID to the cloned drive. With rsync you can synchronise the source drive with the clone drive. You can’t do this with dd or the Balena Etcher. Each time I run the script, it only clones what’s different, and it takes minutes to do this. Rsync is also faster than dd.

1 Like
4

Rsync is awesome for this

5

Do I understand correctly that you can use Balena Etcher to backup (or clone) your drive but not to restore it? How do you restore it then?

6

I saw that Gnome Disks utility can make an image of disk/partition too. Never tried it myself.
P.S., Gnome Disks can restore from an image file as well.