I’ve been 100% on Linux since July of last year. I thought I was currently having my first major Linux fucked up situation that I just could not figure out this weekend.
It has been very depressing, after trying to convince friends and family to give Linux a chance and keep an open mind for months, I was beginning to feel like a fraud and a liar.
But, after hours of software troubleshooting turning up nothing I’ve discovered I’m in the early stages of a dying ssd… My first major problem, and it’s hardware related. It sucks but it is also a relief in a weird way.
And I’m finding out about it way earlier than I likely would have in windows thanks to btrfs. But it’s also funny because if I had been having similar issues in windows I probably would have ran hardware diag much sooner, but because I’m still a bit of a Linux newbie I assumed I broke my OS and wasted hours troubleshooting software.
If you’re running btrfs, you can send live snapshots to another btrfs volume on another drive, or use Timeshift which will do it for you amd keep track of expiring old copies. Clonezilla is OK for when you are able to take the system down entirely.
My install does use btrfs (but unfortunately since I reused the other drives they are still ntfs formatted) and it does regular snapshots, but to the same drive. It isn’t completely borked yet so I’m hopeful I can “clone” to a new drive and rma the bad one (10 months old so should still have mfr warranty). I’ve used clonezilla in the past but had read it doesn’t support btrfs, maybe that info is outdated? I did see some promising tools for doing basically the same job through btrfs though. I planned to work on salvaging what I can tonight. Worst case scenario, all my personal files are synced to a cloud storage service so I’d just be out installed programs and configs if I have to reinstall from fresh.
Do a block copy, takes longer but it should handle pretty Mich any filesystem. Downside is I don’t think you resize on the target.
You could also put the new drive in, target Time shift to it and let it buck. Then pull your old drive out and let it boor to the new one, see how that goes.
