what would happen if I tried to use the dd command to restore my image file back to the original hard drive it was copied from?
You asked
VladiBG but let me answer it:
You can do 1:1 copies of drives and partitions with
dd. I did it several times myself, and it works.
BUT:
You may save any drive to any other, as long as it's equally large, or larger.
But with GPT partition scheme the copy will only work (being not bootable, not finding the correct partitions) if the drive is an identical drive. But you can do this, e.g. to make a full drive backup of e.g. your 500G Windows drive to a e.g. 1T drive (which was half empty then, and not bootable). But when it's needed you can
dd it back the same way. I've done this many times myself. It works.
BUT: This ain't no efficient way of doing backups, because you backup
everything, the garbage you don't need to backup as also all empty sectors. A 500G drive containing 102G of stuff needs 500G space for the image - and you're waiting hours to "save" 400G empty space
.
It's just for saving the state of a whole drive, which you're not going to use for quite a while, and which cannot be backupped otherwise, as I said, for Windows partitions. But it's nothing senseful, neither reasonable, nor useful, nor needed, nor recommended to do that with any unix[like] (BSD, or Linux). Just a waste of time and space producing not useful BU. Because when you restore them, you enter the time machine, and go back to the state when the BU was made... months ago, if not years, and anything you made in between is not contained on that copy; because how often do you BUs that last app. six or twelve hours for a 1T drive, even longer for larger drives? - Uh, and yeah, the system has to be stopped at this time, need to boot a live system instead to do the BU/restore, because the drive you want to BU needs to be not in use - so not really practically usable.
But also I recommend not to BU your Windows partition(s), at least not the main one. Better remove that drive from your machine as it is, store it at a safe place, and spend your machine another, unused drive, maybe a new one instead. Does not have to be large (128...256G was fully sufficient; since larger amounts of your data you don't need everyday (pictures, music, movies,...) you better place not in /home/ but better on another extra drive only for that (or an NAS, if you not already have such.)
AND BUT: With using
dd for BU drives you always write all blocks of the whole drive. This does not only last long. With SSDs you're wasting many write cycles uselessly.
So: Doable, but not recommendable.
Also, this information is pushing me towards the decision to completely get rid of both Windows10 and Ubuntu.
Good choice. But ensure you have full 1:1 BU of your Windows system - any old system you ever used, or as I said, store the drive itself at a safe place. By experience you will sooner or later need the one or the other file you saved there. Don't burn that bridge, until you are fully and completely moved to your new system, and being absolutely sure for some years, there is nothing left you may miss. (You can mount [almost] any kind of filesystem from other OS to your FreeBSD [by USB adapter for example] and have access to that drives.)
It makes sense that a simplified system would be a more stable system.
That's true, but it's not what I meant. FreeBSD ain't more stable, because it's simplified, but because it's sophisticated.
What I meant was: There are possibilities to install more than one OS on one drive. Many do have Windows, FreeBSD, several Linux... on one drive. So did I once. For that a bootloader is needed. While I run FreeBSD only exclusively, I think FreeBSD's bootloader may be also capable of doing that, but I don't know, and while Windows for sure is not,
GRUB is commonly the most used one for that. Last time I checked it was not really trivial as I knew it twenty years ago - Those "Linux guys" have to bloat everything to a most complicated level
.
Anyway I
highly recommend to do a full BU of your drive first (dd), or better start on a blank extra drive all over,
before you start even think of tinkering with bootloaders at all. If you are not experienced, and do a mistake, you can wipe your drive, and all what's installed with it.
The fact that I no longer have to be concerned with the MBR seems completely incomprehensible to me. For years I have always lived in fear of not being able to fix my MBR, but now it doesn't seem to be an issue.
You and me both. In my Windows days I had a DVD, later USB thumb drive with
gparted live by hand, and several HDDs with USB to SATA Adapters, and made the DJ by backing up whole drives over night, sometimes even whole weekends.
So I can comprehend it's hard to let go. But with FreeBSD (any BSD, or Linux) you don't need that anymore. All you need are copies of the files.
Yes. And it will never end, neither you can learn everything. But don't panic!
When you have BUs you can rely on to restore from, when you messed up things (and you will.
), nothing serious can really happen. Feel free to experiment as you like. Do crazy stuff, if you like!
Apart from that all you need is a start where to begin. While I mentioned one above I think was a good, solid start, others will give you other ideas... - this forums is full of newbie question, and what, and how to start. Browse to see other ideas.
FreeBSD is a solid fundamental base system, very flexible, very adaptable, and above all
extremely powerful, and very sophisticated, bringing decades of knowledge and experience in computer science.
The "difficulty" with FreeBSD is, even if it's already a full complete OS you can do a lot with (my server in the attic runs a default basic installation with only three packages installed: samba, vim, and svn) at the same time it's a large, almost empty sheet of paper - a very, very large paper. And only you can know, what you want to write or paint on it.
Most things are not really that complicated, and most is well documented. It's just simply a lot of stuff you need to pick from what you need, and want.
Because while Ubuntu seems a bit like FreeBSD on the surface, they are not the same,
They are not. But likewise. FreeBSD comes from BSD, I call it the "West Coast Unix", while Ubuntu is a Linux, which was once made copying some things to do like Unix.
While Unix is a protected name, BSD are not allowed to be named that, even if they were some kind of it. See
Unix, the graph at the top right (yes, the german site. you only need the picture. you may read the text on the english site.)
it never crashed or seldom became unstable
Any unix[like] is very stable, including Mac OS.
But why those are stable, or better, why Windows is -
was not that stable (95, 98 were terrible! But since XP it became (almost) pretty stable [I stopped using it with 7; can't tell anything about 8, 10 or 11) is another story maybe told in another place another time by others who can tell better.
I admit that I have a bad habit of taking shortcuts, without sometimes really understanding what I'm doing.
No excuses needed. That's not really a bad habit. Everybody does them. Often enough things simply need to be done quickly. And it's also a good way to learn: Just copy paste a template, see something works, and then learn by the example, how it works. I also often don't read all manpages completely top-down, but take a glimpse at the header, skim fast through it, and look at the examples at the bottom. From that I work myself up again, search for a certain option, if there is no example for what I need exactly - if I find it usable.
IMO besides some basics (installation, shell usage and BU) you only need to learn two kinds of things:
1. Things you want to do otherwise, or modify.
2. Curiosity
A bad habit was to do shortcuts only, and don't try to learn anything at all.
But I have the feeling, you're doing it right.
So, enough by me. There are others which can tell you more/better/other, and above all, hanging in the forums does not get the things done.
