VSIDO Installation Guide for fsarchive version

[jedi]

So, after many installs using this latest .fsa method (METHOD to be clear, not the currently available download) I daresay it's about perfect!  I'd have saved myself a lot of grief had I simply read the very beginning of PackRat's post "...tioned drive. Legacy BIOS system"

That said, I've given some effort on the UEFI only way, but to no avail.  So far the only successful way for me has been by installing another distro first (Official Debian Sid/bookworm) in order to get the UEFI signed bios key that comes with that particular distro's installer.  I'm aware of other distros having a signing key as well for UEFI I just haven't looked that deep.  My 3 reasons work for me...

#1. It's to easy to do using the 3 available methods! 

#2. There is so much disk space available these days that another distro I hardly see in order to have a UEFI system is worth it.  A pain to have to update-grub twice but hey small price.  Part of the 'worth' being 3 or 4 second boot times! 

#3. There are still a tremendous amount of things about Linux I don't know or understand.  It works.  I don't have to know or understand.  When incredible people like VastOne and PackRat continue to watch over our community/forum and GIVE us their wisdom/knowledge for nothing in return I'm awed.  Thanks to both of you for saving my mind and ALWAYS being there for Linux...

[VastOne]

#2. There is so much disk space available these days that another distro I hardly see in order to have a UEFI system is worth it.  A pain to have to update-grub twice but hey small price.  Part of the 'worth' being 3 or 4 second boot times! 

Hey Jedi.. Excellent feedback and thank you for all the efforts in testing these      Also thank you for the kind words..

Once you have it installed, from your vsido installation you should be able to then just run the following and only have to worry about one grub to update if the vsido install is all you care about

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sudo grub-install /dev/sda

[VastOne]

Hey RatMan.. I am parking this here because it makes sense since there is so much How To discussion on using fsarchiver.. In using btrfs exclusively I ran into an issue where I could not get fsarchiver to restore my main root partition that I do all my work on. Since I use nVidia, occasionally I get a broken system due to a nVidia upgrade where I need to wait a day or more for nVidia to fix and release the code.. So I keep a near weekly backup of my current system and restore it to a secondary disk on the same machine.. In all my work with ext4, it never had any issues with uuid's, in fact it gives no shits about how you want to restore to, btrfs on the other hand does. Fsarchiver will not restore a btrfs file system to the machine if it detects the same uuid already on that machine, it spits out an error and life goes on.

Still have the issue though and needed a solution other than creating snapshots (story for another day) and began a search that led me straight to the fsarchiver manpages and a solution which made fsarchiver that much more an incredible tool IMO.. there is a uuid option to change the uuid on the restore! Below is the fsarchive command to generate it and also a cool site that generates random uuid's

Get a random uuid here: Random UUID (v4) generator

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sudo fsarchiver -v restfs vsido_btrfs_10AUG2023.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sdXX,uuid=ea33a312-71f8-4172-b3c9-027ca7f4264a
The uuid in that example is one I pulled for that site DO NOT USE IT, get your own!

[PackRat]

Nice find.

[VastOne]

Nice find.

Thanks, I would put fsarchiver up there with any of the greatest foss apps ever catagory