I have set up a refurbished PC as a media PC with storage. The OS, Debian, is on an m.2 nvme disk of 256 GB. I have connected 2x4TB risks in zfs mirror mode to store my media.

Off late, while booting, I’ve noticed some messages that suggest that the health of nvme disk is not good. Searching the error, i realised that I should not rely on it. I’ve done a number of tweaks to set up my system the way I like that I want to save by creating an image of the OS drive on a fresh nvme disk of same size that I have.

How do I go about doing it? I could boot using a live USB and create the image on the HDDs but the live USB OS won’t recognise my zfs, right? Is using another external disk or another PC my only option here?

Thanks and cheers!

PS: The machine is a HP Elitedesk 800 G3 that has a wifi port that I’ve heard can be used as additional port for m.2 drives. Is it true?

  • @[email protected]English
    5•7 months ago

    If you want an image, it doesn’t matter what the underlying file system is. You should be able to use a tool like Clonezilla and get a 1:1 copy. Depending how you’ve set up partitioning, you could also use sgdisk to set up the proper partitions and zfs send/recv for the new data portion of the drive and install a boot loader. That’s probably the way I’d go in this instance.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      2•7 months ago

      I get the part that the cloning software does not care for the underlying OS. My worry is the fact that I’ll run the cloning software/command from a live USB which will not be able to detect the zfs mirror on my backup drive on its own and thus break the zfs mirror with bad consequences for the existing data. I could not find any commands to make the live USB OS discover and respect the existing zfs configuration.