I'm dualbooting Windows 10 and Linux Mint.
Is it possible to do a file based backup of the Windows System Partition using Linux?
UEFI is already entirely file based and not bound to the MBR of the disk.
[edit: the UEFI boot process is independ of the MBR. Thus im not in the need of backing up the MBR like it used to be when using BIOS systems.]
My question is whether the boot process after loading the bootloader from the EFI-partition is entirely file based too on the windows site.
The workflow would be the following for the backup (booting linux):
- Back up the files of the EFI-Partition
- Back up the files of the Windows Partition
- Back up the files of the Recovery Partition
to restore the following needs no be done:
- boot Linux live cd. start gparted.
- create an empty fat partition. Set the correct flags.
- copy the EFI files to that partition.
- create a recovery Partition
- copy the Recovery Files to that partition.
- create an ntfs-Partition.
- copy the windows files to that partition.
- boot from windows usb recovery media
- Fix the bootloader on the EFI-Partion using bcdboot
- Repair windows recovery using reagentc
At least for the recovery and efi partition part I can tell that this works because I once deleted and restored it from files this way.
I already did the steps above copying partitions with gparted when moving the system to a new drive. The partitions got new UUIDs and new positions. With bcdboot/reagentc I could repair the EFI- and recovery partitions afterwards to boot successfully.
Will this work with file-copies, too? Is there something "inside a windows partition" that is not visible when observing the files on the drive.
I dont want to copy the whole partition because I want to do automated incremental backups with rsync on a btrfs disk. File based could save a lot of time there for me.