Hey there I am another refugee from windows with the forced push to windows 11. I thought it was time I tried once again linux. So far I am pretty satisfied.
I installed Fedora with KDE and successfully migrated my syncthing server, sftp server. Correctly mounted my nft disks and successfully installed mullvad with all split tunneling I needed.
Now I need advices about 3 things which I sorely miss and which keep forcing me to boot on windows :
- is there any equivalent to macrium reflect, allowing to schedule weekly image backup for system disk. So it could be restored in case something really goes wrong.
My system disk is brtfs. Time machine looks nice but it’s not working because I have no @home and @root volume identified. I found explanations which explain how to do it but I am not too sure it’s a good idea to do so.
I also found rsync. Didn’t explore enough this solution but I am not sure an image backup can be done if system is running ? - for vscode it’s easy and I got it running for my linux environment. Yet I have programs which are meant specifically to run on windows and so I can’t develop and test them on linux
- at last for my work I need to be able to use excel. Libre office is not a solution, it’s ok for basic usage but it’s far behind if you’re using it professionally. Please don’t turn this about an arguments to say calc is good, really there is something that are just impossible with it. (Like using arrays, power query or data models)
For the last 2 points I feel like my only solution would be to use a virtual machine running windows. Is there a way to run them on it but make it looks like it’s a linux app? Somewhat is it what docker is doing but for linux apps ?
Well I feel like I have not many options if I want excel and vscode on windows environment. So sadly I think that will settled it. Please share your thoughts.
I would also really appreciate people sharing what they do to backup their system disk.
Thanks for your advice !
Sounds like you’ve got a good handle on most of it. FWIW, here’s how I deal with some of the same issues:
For Windows apps I’ve found a virtual machine is the easiest solution. It’s set it up to share folders between Linux and the Windows VM so moving things between OS’s is easy. I’ve tried other methods like Wine, and for the Windows apps I need the VM works best by far.
Did you mean Timeshift? (Time Machine is Apple software.) Timeshift works great for incremental backups and is easy to use so you should get it working, but in my case I also do full system backups every few weeks because setting up my systems from scratch is a PITA and really time consuming, especially for my server.
For those full backups I’ve set up a bootable persistent live USB SSD with Ubuntu. The persistent SSD is fully configured with all software, including VNC, SSH and Clonezilla. Creating a backup requires plugging in the SSD, rebooting and running Clonezilla either locally or remotely. Clonezilla is also also preconfigured so it requires only a few steps to start the backup. Full system backups take about 20-30 minutes to complete but my SSDs aren’t that big.
Enjoy your move to Linux. It’s well worth the effort.
I do something similar but my live USB is just bootable Clonezilla. I’d like to hear more about why you use a live Ubuntu ssd.
I started with a Clonezilla USB a few years ago, but Ubuntu is more flexible and can be used for everything with both VNC and SSH. The GUI is easier for some tasks, and Nautilus, Disk Usage Analyzer, Gparted, and other utilities are all available on the same SSD used for backups.