Hey there I am another refugee from windows with the forced push to windows 11. I thought it was time I tried once again linux. So far I am pretty satisfied.
I installed Fedora with KDE and successfully migrated my syncthing server, sftp server. Correctly mounted my nft disks and successfully installed mullvad with all split tunneling I needed.

Now I need advices about 3 things which I sorely miss and which keep forcing me to boot on windows :

  • is there any equivalent to macrium reflect, allowing to schedule weekly image backup for system disk. So it could be restored in case something really goes wrong.
    My system disk is brtfs. Time machine looks nice but it’s not working because I have no @home and @root volume identified. I found explanations which explain how to do it but I am not too sure it’s a good idea to do so.
    I also found rsync. Didn’t explore enough this solution but I am not sure an image backup can be done if system is running ?
  • for vscode it’s easy and I got it running for my linux environment. Yet I have programs which are meant specifically to run on windows and so I can’t develop and test them on linux
  • at last for my work I need to be able to use excel. Libre office is not a solution, it’s ok for basic usage but it’s far behind if you’re using it professionally. Please don’t turn this about an arguments to say calc is good, really there is something that are just impossible with it. (Like using arrays, power query or data models)

For the last 2 points I feel like my only solution would be to use a virtual machine running windows. Is there a way to run them on it but make it looks like it’s a linux app? Somewhat is it what docker is doing but for linux apps ?

Well I feel like I have not many options if I want excel and vscode on windows environment. So sadly I think that will settled it. Please share your thoughts.
I would also really appreciate people sharing what they do to backup their system disk.

Thanks for your advice !

  • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    4 days ago

    Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.

    can’t it, though?

    macrium reflect’s normal operation is to run when the ststem is running normally. it creates a volume shadowcopy of your filesystem, and backs that up. a BTRFS/ZFS snapshot is basically what a volume shadowcopy is on windows, but with a less fancy name. if you make a snapshot, you can back that up, either with zfs send, btrfs send, rsync, borg backup, whatever. the difference is that on linux it’s not possible to notify programs that a snapshot will happen please sanitize your databases, while windows does that too, so if you restore on linux that’s like if your computer crashed because power went off

    sure, it can’t be done with other filesystems, but OP said they have BTRFS. I think the boot partition can be safely imaged too: remount as read only and make a normal image.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      4 days ago

      Sure.

      But there’s no program that just creates a handy partition image. You’ll have to get into the weeds of how your filesystem actually works.