PopOS Linux: Creating a Bootable Backup USB With Encryption

https://hajo.me/blog/2026/02/16/popos-linux-creating-bootable-backup-USB-with-encryption/

by fxtentacle • 3 months ago

29 13 3 months ago

hajo.me

itsthecourier• 3 months ago

been using for a while. nice Ubuntu distro.

system76 is great

neilfrndes• 3 months ago

I daily drive a PopOS (22) on my laptop, it simplifies dealing with Nvidia drivers.

I recently upgraded to the 24.x version that runs Cosmic DE. While I loved the visuals and design, the whole OS was buggy. The GitHub issues about memory leaks I faced related to cosmic have been open for a while.

fxtentacle2• 3 months ago

Yeah I'm still on 22. But I also usually use the ESR versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, because especially when I'm traveling, I value the stability of my home workstation over almost all else.

aPoCoMiLogin• 3 months ago

can you link these issues? i'm planning upgrade from 22.x but i'm afraid of some breaking issues. also did you upgrade or reinstall ? if upgrade, were there some issues with that ?

Wojtkie• 3 months ago

Yeah, the COSMIC lack of polish caused me to jump to CachyOS.

dhedlund• 3 months ago

One flag that you might have missed. If you have sparse files such as qcow disk images, you might also need `-S`, `--sparse` or it will expand the file to its full disk size when copied to the destination.

fxtentacle2• 3 months ago

Thanks :)

scrollop• 3 months ago

Great OS! Though have some issues with waking from sleep.

sandreas• 3 months ago

While I like the article, I much prefer ZFS by now.

With CachyOS having ZFS in the installer, you can just natively encrypt your setup with an officially maintained project, USB drives are usable too.

After this you can use zrepl to autosnapshot and sync your ZFS either remotely via SSH or on USB with a few simple shell commands vor even use manual zfs snapshot / zfs send.

If something breaks syncing back also works flawlessly.

I personally also use ZFSBootMenu which lets you clone an old snapshot if e.g. the kernel breaks and having a separate dataset for /home lets you keep your documents if required.

I'm not going back to luks/btrfs/ext4 anytime soon...

akimbostrawman• 3 months ago

Openzfs and ZFSBootMenu has been my personal single greatest additions to linux. I would switch to BSD before i would use linux again without a competent bootmanager and filesystem.

PopOS Linux: Creating a Bootable Backup USB With Encryption

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