Backup Your OS Drive Easily in Openmediavault

Easy OS drive backup.
lsblk ---lists disk and partitions
sudo dd if=/dev/from of=/dev/to bs=1M

To send mail: TechnoDadLife, PO Box 114, Jamestown, NY 14701

Thanks for all your support! These are affiliate links so they do provide some support to the channel, so I can more videos!

[mrmotofy]

At the end of the dd command add status=progress and you will see a progress bar...not necesarily needed for this application but very nice to see what's going on. The backup process can also be done with Rsync which is generally better since it will only write the changes not the whole thing...but there's different ways of doing it.

[googleuser]

Thank you for your videos, really helped get into OMV and setting up my homelab server. One comment on this one: since especially with servers/OMV drives/volumes attached to the machines are like to change now and then (as per your recommended method here), there is a certain risk of disks beeing labeled differently after a reboot or a change in connected disks. That might cause the source disk be renamed from /dev/sda to /dev/sdc or so. Worst case, source and destination get switched up. And since we're doing it as root, system will assume we know what we're doing and not ask twice. Seen it happen.

My recommendation therefore: use disk id instead of label. First find out ids: ls -la /dev/disk/by-id. Then use the ids for your dd command (as root): dd bs=1M

[yuriw]

Great video! Would be useful to add how to create a disk backup on another drive and then restore to a sd card. It would cut the time significantly

[robertpray]

Thanks Techno Dad! Worked perfectly on my Pi 4 running OMV 6.9.14-1. Copied from my 16GB micro sd card to a 32GB USB stick. Boots and runs fine off the USB Stick with a big read speed increase. One think I did notice no uuid on the USB.

[mrmotofy]

Ok so lemme see if I follow this correctly, the OMV5 is running on the Pi or whichever device. From another machine using putty, or the console of OMV5, login to console find OS drive then setup a cron job to copy\dd that to another drive that stays attached...so there's a constant backup that gets run according to the schedule. In theory that copy can then be used to immediately run\operate as a cloned drive?

Or one can remove drive completely and copy/Image/clone drive manually from a different system? Or while operating from a Live OS as opposed to removing.

In the System menu, there's a Backup option, visible in your list also...it appears to do the same. There's a note that it automatically saves a cron job etc. It's a little unclear though what it does. It appears to only save to a shared folder

[gfcgabriel]

Great vídeo! This Will also backup the omv-extras anos Docker containers? ALL Will work using the backup drive in another machine?

[hugoacevedo]

thanks Techno Dada, I had time waiting for this video.

[tobias]

Did excactly what you described, still OMV doesn't start with my second SSD, getting tons of errors at startup...

[Watches_Anonymous]

I've done this with mine. Spinner internal (sda) and backup to external USB spinner (sdb). Found the system tries to boot from usb data, despite me blocking it from bios. Seems to piggy back off the grub loader then loads up partitions from the usb. Any idea how to stop it booting from sdb ?

[teejaybradford]

did that, swapped the drivers and now get an elf magic error...seems it didn't copy the grub boot part

[scottg]

Thank you for that. I didn’t know about “scheduled jobs”. I’d like to use that to backup files from one ssd to another. My question is if I use “cp” is it a Unix/Pi “cp” that runs? I’d like to use “cp -r /mnt/Source* /mnt/Backup. I’m assuming it is since you used “dd”.

[Halford]

This was extremely helpful! Thank you!

[redhatazi]

How to clone my OMV OS installed on a 230Gb HDD to a Kingston 240 GB SSD ? Can I use aomei backupper professional to do that ? Or I should use another method like Clonezilla? Any suggestions pls.

[GeraldCameron-sh]

I know this is old but there's a gotcha with this method I found out. After the first write of the DD command the drive cannot be remounted as the first partition is vfat and you get a superblock error trying to load for another dd write.

[jimdombroski]

is the bs=1m important? its not in the video but your comment ?

[Hereitis]

Take care using this method! If you have more than the system drive and the drive to back up to connected, the drive names can change on a reboot and you will overwrite data.

[mornic]

great as always Technodad. Unfortuantely, my back up USB or HD comes up with an error of having to manually run FSCK. Original OS Thumbdrive works but anytime I do this DD method onto another disk or USB stick it gets stuck with that error.

[undrpr]

I don´t know, this can be dangerous. If you restart the system or the partitions change (sda becomes sdb, vice versa), you can have a mess on the system.

[eivindray]

Thanks for all the videos you do ! Do you know a way to backup only the system files and not the entire disk ? Because i'm a noob and i used a 2To disk for system and now i would like to switch to a smaller one.

[ranieri]

Thanks thanks thanks. Only one more question: is it possible to copy the os from usb to an internal ssd and than boot from the ssd? If yes: is there a simple way to partition the ssd? Thanks you TDL!