Full-disk, fast, compressed backups and restoring, using MX Linux Snapshot and zstd

[esbeeb]

Please see this post:

MXlinux NO1

Normally I don’t trumpet any distro as being the supreme distro of the universe, as it can come across as impolite, but there is a cool thing I discovered recently in MX Linux that I really appreciated. A fellow Linux user I recently met wanted to do a compressed full disk backup of his Linux Mint Install. I felt this was a job for zstd, which I had installed, so I made a bootable USB stick for him containing it, using the “MX Snapshot” tool (and I checked the “Resetting accounts (for distribu…

In retrospect, I wish I would have put that content here…

[DannyBoy]

What degree of idiot am I if the idea of compressing backups or temporary clones has never even crossed my mind?

[Mr_McBride]

You’re not. I don’t do it either. No need, in my opinion. There’s very little, if anything I need outside of my home directory. This is by design, so that is all I ever backup.

[DannyBoy]

Oh, I need the space. I just hadn’t considered the option before.

[esbeeb]

What I think zstd brings to the table, is that the compression is (very efficiently) multi-threaded, so that there is little time lost (compared to other compression algorithms out there) in compressing on the fly. The (default level of) compression of zstd is so fast and good that it’s worth going out of my way to use, IMHO.

The wicked speed of internal M.2 and NVME drives now, as well as external SSD’s in USB 3 enclosures (with a decent controller chip like a JMS578, which will write at about 200MB/sec, sustained), make for such fast full-disk backups (like 10-15 min for a 256GB M.2 drive), that why not just grab the whole gosh-darned disk in the backup?

Any empty areas of space on the disk getting imaged get crushed down to almost nothing, and this happens very fast.