I'd like to backup the state of my system. It only runs Manjaro.
What I've done in the past when I need to install something else on the machine temporarily is just to dd
the whole drive to a file and then back again when I want to restore it.
However, that doesn't really make sense this time, because the whole root filesystem only has 17gb in use. My question is this: could I
- boot from a linux live usb
- mount my root filesystem (
sda2
) somewhere - copy all of its contents to external media
- install windows
- do what i need to with windows
- boot another live linux system.
- repartition the drive, format the largest partition as ext4
- restore the original volume contents to the drive
- boot up again
And have it work as it did before I backed it up? Would it be basically functionally equivalent to the dd
approach?
Would I be missing an MBR, still? Would this be remedied by simply setting the new partition to "boot" in gparted when partitioning? Any other caveats?