Has anyone used Gnome Disks to backup partitions on a Live USB. I know they are not compressed like Rescuezilla but thought it might handy to backup other partitions that are not mounted and then boot into the Live USB to backup the Zorin Partition.
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Nope, because I use Timeshift to make backups to my externally plugged in USB drive.
Timeshift should already be installed on your Zorin OS installation, but if its not, you can find it in the software store...
Its a flexible backup solution, as you can tell it where you want to store the backups, and you can configure it to save as many backups as you'd like, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. You can configure to do partial backups, or full backups.
FYI, if you set it up to do full backups like I have, it uses a lot of drive space to do it, so you might want to think about having at least a 1TB to 2TB drive for doing full backups. I am using a 500GB drive for doing full backups, and I am having to delete old backups monthly, as the drive fills up fast.
But yeah, Timeshift is the way to go.
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I'm not a fan of using Timeshift in this way. Its intended purpose is to store the changes made between each snapshot so that you can rollback when something goes wrong. Like accidentally upgrading a package that needed to be at version X instead of X+1, for whatever reason (think of kernel upgrades).
System configuration and personal files should be treated differently. This way, you can always restore changes to the system without it affecting your own files. That's what Timeshift is very good at.
Your personal files can be backed up using other tools like Deja-Dup, etc, to an external location. Again, this allows you to restore personal files without messing with system configuration.
For cloning entire drives, Rescuezilla would be my preferred method. I don't know if it supports individual partitions already, though, this was missing still last time I checked. I haven't used Disks for this before so I can't compare to how well this works.
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It does, I regularly backup a partition that has changed eg Solus and leave others that haven't.
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Thanks, that is good to know. I've stopped doing full disk backups since I'm now much more comfortable with rebuilding my configuration quickly when I need to, so I hadn't check for a while.
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