Hi,
I have fedora 37 with gnome and I want to install another fedora but I would like to know if I can make an image of my complete fedora 37 to keep it intact if I need to re install that one?
thanks
A quick search for backup software will tell you a lot.
One of the things you must know and be aware of is that fedora uses a btrfs file system and backing that up is not the same process as the older LVM & EXT4 file systems. Educate yourself and let us know what you would be working with when asking questions.
If you have a bit of time you might read on #start-here to know the type of information you could provide to help us to help you.
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I use Rescuezilla to make a clone before I upgrade to the next release
I also backup my home on a regular bases
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so with the clone, you have everything like a complete image, right?
hi again, with Rescuezilla, when I boot and choose that option, when I select an hard drive, what I have on my hard drive will be erased or not? Do I need an empty hard drive to use that?
thanks
You backup data or clone the whole thing but will only work on same identical device. Professional corporate servers split the system on several duplicated storage devices as something can fail.
Simply using DNF package manager you can switch to Rawhide, Silverblue editions, any Fedora Spin : I3, SOAS, Labs : Games, Comp Neuro, Design Suite, … any desktop : XFCE, Mate, Budgie, … and magically rollback with ‘dnf autoremove’.
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yes, I use fedora 37 workstation, I want to clone it, and installing Rawhide, if I have problem I will re install fedora 37 with my clone image
I assume both root and /home are btrfs subvolumes. If so, you could use the snapshot feature of btrfs to capture their state before the upgrade, then do the upgrade and have the ability to roll back to it if things go seriously, but not horribly wrong.
The snapshot obviously doesn’t protect against a hardware problem, the way an external backup would. It also doesn’t protect against some really horrible bug in the btrfs support of the new kernel.
But it is easy and quick and needs no external media and is a lot safer than not making a backup at all (also a lot safer than trusting DNF to be able to correctly and fully rollback).
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Not necessarily true on a case by case basis.
Simplest option to test without messing up the current system.
Install qemu, virt-manager, and libvirt then install a copy of F37 from the iso into a VM. Once installed then use dnf system-upgrade to upgrade the VM to rawhide and test it there.
This will totally avoid potential (likely) harm to your main OS and if the VM gets damaged and cannot be fixed it is easy to delete and reinstall a new VM. It would only require allocating about 30 - 40 GB to the VM and keep the versions of the OS isolated from each other.
I don’t understand what you are asking
It makes a clone of your drive it does not erase the drive
You do have to have a external drive for the cloned image to be saved to
What ever os you install will erase the drive
But I also use pika backup to backup my home directory just in case something went wrong whit the cloned image
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