So right now we're hoping the system will still reboot! Anyway, that's the gist of what we are trying to do, create an ISO or IMG file that could be used to do a full, bootable restore from a known good point if we manage to mess something up.Removing mdadm ...
[ ok ] Stopping MD monitoring service: mdadm --monitor.
W: mdadm: I'll update the initramfs, but if you need MD to boot
W: mdadm: with initramfs, your system may be left unbootable!
We have a Raspberry Pi that runs Raspbx, with Raspian as the underlying OS, and it has a script called raspbx-backup that is rather long but at the core it seems to be using dd to copy everything to an IMG file. So I looked at dd and I cannot determine exactly what options I'd need to use to get what I want under Debian, since I'm trying to back up a hard drive and not an SD card. So I'm curious whether anyone uses dd to back up their system to an ISO or IMG file, and if so, would you please be so kind as to tell me what options you use?
Or is there a better or easier way to do this, keeping in mind that it must be something we can do from the command line?
Just to throw out one other thing, ideally I'd LIKE to be able to exclude from the backup two directories that contain nothing but temporary video files (/hts/recordings and /hts/timeshift). But as far as I can tell dd has no way to do that, it seems to be a full disk clone utility. It's not THAT important if I can't do that, but it is something that would be desirable, providing it doesn't make this task more complex.