Ubuntu – Unable to Create Backup Image With Gnome-Disk-Utility

backupdisk-imagegnome-disk-utilitypartitioning

New to the forums and running 18.04. Probably a rookie mistake I am making, but scoured the forums and tutorials.

The gnome-disk-utility tutorials are simple enough and appear to be working in the os they are backing up – just select the partition or whole disk image and choose a destination.

I have a 3 partitions:

  1. fat… /dev/sda1
  2. ext4… /dev/sda2 the linux image I am actually trying to backup
  3. swap partition… /dev/sda3

If I attempt to image the whole disk, after I authenticate I get this error:
Error unmounting /dev/sda2:target is busy (udisks-error-quark, 14)

Another error I see is just trying to create a backup of the /dev/sda1 partition alone:
Error opening file "/media/freebird/FBbackup/Disk Image of sda1 (2019-11-24 1620).img": Permission denied (g-io-error-quark, 14)

The closest I have been to getting any of the 3 partitions to image is with the swap partition, but only after I disable swapping with sudo swapoff -a then it works just like in the tutorials and to any destination location. I obviously don't care about the swap partition, but I get errors if I try to use gnome-disk to do the whole drive or either of the other two partitions individually.

I also tried running from Live USB, but then I get permissions issues and similar errors. What am I missing?

Thanks!

Brian

Best Answer

Applause for wanting to make a System Backup!

The easiest way to accomplish this is with a bootable USB stick and an external USB HDD using CloneZilla Live:

  1. Download and "Burn" the CloneZilla Live ISO (Instructions are provided over there)
  2. Boot the CloneZilla Live USB stick
  3. Use the Save Disk Image system
  4. Insert the external HDD when CloneZilla asks you to do so: CloneZilla Disk Insert Image
  5. Wait until done.

The best way to accomplish this is to copy the CloneZilla ISO to your existing system and just boot it from grub on your own system (one less USB Stick that you can lose) and follow the same steps as above. (CloneZilla Live is the very last example in that answer).

:-)

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