I haven't used TimeShift to do a full backup yet. The couple of times I've used it to revert a troublesome system to an earlier snapshot it has worked flawlessly. But knowing now that its capabilities go far beyond the basic use I've had for it is exciting.

I tried CloneZilla on my Linux Mint system and never felt confidant or comfortable using it. TimeShift on the other hand, the little I've done with it, just 'made sense'. So, following your lead, I'll do a complete backup, home directory and all, on a USB-3 thumb drive and put that away for any 'just in case' need I may have for it as time goes by..

George - It's a nice utility. I've setup the options for manual control. No scheduled backups. Scheduling seems to grab the mount point on removable devices and makes unmounts and mounts create errors. It must run in the background and tie up the USB port. Format your blank media to ext4 using GParted. Careful to selection the right media. Set TimeShift for the whole ball of wax (settings->users) by clicking the Include All Files buttons. Turn off the scheduling. Mount your media, let it enumerate then make sure that's set as the target (settings->location). Run create. I had about 12Gb which took 15 minutes. You'll should see a single timeshift folder created. That's what can be used to re-image your entire HD. Obviously, you'll need to install a bare bones Linux system that allows running TimeShift on a totally dead machine. I always have DVDs with the current O/S burned. This would work on an unbootable machine and/or one with a new HD. I always keep a second laptop identical to the one I use for all my applications.

To do another image, mount the media and use sudo rm -r timeshift from the terminal window opened from the root containing the timeshift folder. It's a recursive delete and it took about 5 minutes to kill the folder + contents. Just wait for the prompt to come back. System seems hung but it's working. Then do another create from TimeShift. You'll have a fresh and current BU this way. This is what I did and it worked fine. Never hurts to have a couple of backups on two removable storage devices. TimeShift is tons better than CloneZilla which is rough to say the least. Its kernel is also fussy on what it will boot on. It's also slow as a turtle some 3 hours to image a HD.

TimeShift does incremental BUs so there may be more efficient ways to use the application. I haven't tested any of them, however. What's above I know works. Good luck!

It works great! Now I know. Thanks for the walk through. That will be a handy tool to have. I ran it on my main machine backing up to a 64GB USB-3 stick formatted to ext4. I had WAY to much data to be backed up to make it a quick job, but it got it done. If I ever needed to reinstall or clone this system to a different machine I could put it back 'exactly' as it was. Like I said, 'a handy tool to have', and a heck of a lot easier than trying to do the same thing with CloneZilla..

George - When I go between machines the UUID is different on the HD. The UUID is a unique identifier used in partitions to uniquely identify partitions in Linux operating systems. You'll get this message during the boot:

[FAILED] Failed to start Remount Root and Kernel File System.

It doesn't hang the system but flashes by and boot through. This wouldn't happen if you're restoring back to the same HD. It might happen if you replace the HD and load Linux, run TimeShift and do a restore. I've solved the problem be putting the proper UUID is /etc/fstab I keep these notes on my other blog and when I finish the TimeShift instructions completely detailing everything I'll post the link here. You can use lsblk -f to get the UUID for the primary partition. Copy and past that into /etc/fstab so GRUB sees the boot partition. You can also specify nofail to suppress the message which is a band aid. More details forth coming.

It's these wrinkles that make Linux challenging. Many hours required to get this figured out. TimeShift would never know to make these system specific changes. But GRUB is smart enough to find the boot device even though the UUID is incorrect.

George - I try to document instructions on stuff I usually forget because I don't do it often. HD imaging being one such activity. I finished up with TimeShift which worked fine for me cloning a laptop configuration and restoring it on another laptop. I did experience a UUID wrinkle which I researched and solved. All the dope is HERE if you want to read what I did. The UUID stuff is near the end should you encounter a boot [FAILED] message. I don't know how UUIDs are generated so if you replaced a HD and had to restore it, this might come up.

A dead laptop would require a fresh distro reload and installing TimeShift. During the install, a new UUID might be assigned which would differ from the previous one saved in old the HD image. This I haven't tested. Enjoy!

Good write up with clear instructions for using TimeShift as a complete HD imaging tool. I appreciate you providing this helpful walk-through, Scott. Thanks much!..

No problems. I just got Virtual Box up and running. Reasonably painless this time. I'll do a write up on that. On the Dell M4800 you could bring up a Windows 10 machine. I've got a junk HP Elite Book with a Windows 10 O/S on it I use for development. It isn't connected to the internet either. Jeannie uses Windows XP to run Canoscan for the Canon Document scanner she needs. We just did an import appliance from one of the old Dells. The entire machine came over fine. That's a nice feature BTW.

Not sure which Canoscan model Jeannie uses, but for what it may be worth I run my Canoscan 20 on Mint 20.1 with any issues using the SimpleScan app that's available with Mint. Works perfectly for what I need it to do..

It's an old scanner but might work on native Linux. Can't hurt to plug it in and try it. Thanks for the suggestion.