Senior Member
Joined: 25/07/2019
Location: United StatesPosts: 119
| Posted: 07:40pm 19 Oct 2025 |
I never clone a running system since what you get is not exactly what you would if the disk is not mounted. There will be files that are open, lock files and other things that you will not want in the clone.
In Linux there is a simple way to get a mirror image of the boot disk. Get another disk the same size or bigger. Boot from a CD or USB stick into some version of Linux. Open the console and type ' sudo dd -r -v if=/dev/your boot disk of=/dev/your clone disk and press enter. You will get an exact clone of your boot disk. You can also use this command to make exact duplicates of whole directories. The -r is necessary to recursively travel down the directory trees. The -v is optional to make it verbose, if you want to watch it work. Optionally you can use the bs= command to pick how big the read blocks are, and maybe set to 64K or 1M.
If you want, you can get a disk a bit larger and run the following:
dd -r -v if=/dev/the disk name of=/dev/my-boot-backup.img to make an image file of the disk so you can restore it later.
Linux provides the tools you need at the command line to do just about anything. Look up cloning a linux disk using dd.
I have not used Timeshift but hear it is somewhat popular.