You are not logged in.
Pages: 1
Is it possible to backup a running Arch system that I am booted into? Like running:
rsync -aP --exclude /mnt/backup / /mnt/backup/Last edited by MS1 (2025-07-03 08:30:47)
Offline
Short answer is yes.
However, as you're running that the system will be "changing", new logs will be written, etc. You should probably exclude things like /proc, /dev, /run, /sys.
I don't backup my system, though I did when I previously used timeshift, which I would recommend instead of doing this.
However, I do backup /home using rsync, but I'm selective about what is backed up with the exclude list, and I intentionally follow symlinks and have some other flags set:
rsync --archive -vh -L --delete --update --exclude-from='exclude-list.txt' ~/ /run/media/me/WD\ Backup/Storage\ BackupSo the answer is yes, but its not as simple as that, as you don't want to backup certain things and then restoring it may not be as simple as that. Timeshift at least makes that extremely simple, the only caveat of using that being it is not present on the Arch live ISO, because it requires GTK to run, so if you ever wanted to restore your timeshift snapshot, you'd have to run a live system that has timeshift. I haven't needed to ever, so in the end just stopped backing up the system I'd rather do a fresh install and then restore select /home items manually rather than having a separate partition for it.
If you do use timeshift, it will not back your /home up, you can tell Timeshift to do so, but you may want to instead handle the backup of that with another solution such as a simple rsync command like I run.
Ryzen 7 9850X3D | AMD 7800XT | KDE Plasma
Offline
It is possible, see here!
Offline
Pages: 1