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Full‑Disk Backup & Restore Ritual

Using groot, Btrfs Snapshots, gzip Compression, and SHA‑256 Verification

🏷️ Credits

Author: Damian A. James Williamson (Willtech)
Privilege wrapper: groot by Willtech
AI collaborator: Microsoft Copilot (technical synthesis, procedural structuring)

📘 Overview

This document describes a deterministic, reproducible, and compression‑assisted workflow for:

  • Creating a consistent full‑disk backup of /dev/nvme0n1
  • Streaming it directly onto /dev/sda using gzip
  • Verifying the clone using SHA‑256 block hashing
  • Restoring from /dev/sda back to the NVMe disk
  • Managing the lifecycle of a Btrfs snapshot used for consistency

All privileged operations use the Willtech privilege wrapper:
groot

This workflow is suitable for disaster recovery, disk migration, lineage‑clean archival, and reproducible system state capture.

1. Create a Btrfs Snapshot (Optional but Recommended)

A read‑only snapshot ensures the backup is consistent even while the system is running.

groot btrfs subvolume snapshot -r / /.snap-nvme-backup

If you want to inspect the snapshot:

groot mkdir -p /mnt/snap
groot mount -o ro,subvol=.snap-nvme-backup / /mnt/snap

2. Clone /dev/nvme0n1 → /dev/sda Using gzip Compression

This pipeline performs a compressed, block‑accurate clone directly between disks:

groot dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=progress | gzip -1 | groot dd of=/dev/sda

What this does

  • Reads the entire NVMe disk
  • Compresses the stream (gzip -1 = fastest compression)
  • Immediately decompresses it into /dev/sda
  • No intermediate .img.gz file
  • Fully deterministic byte‑for‑byte clone

This is the cleanest possible “compressed disk teleport”.

3. Verify Clone Integrity Using SHA‑256

Even though /dev/nvme0n1 is live, hashing raw blocks is safe and deterministic.

Hash the source disk:

groot dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=none | sha256sum

Hash the clone:

groot dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M status=none | sha256sum

If the hashes match, the clone is perfect.

4. Restore /dev/sda → /dev/nvme0n1

You can restore using the same compressed pipeline:

groot dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress | gzip -1 | groot dd of=/dev/nvme0n1

Or restore without compression:

groot dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=progress

Both produce a byte‑accurate restoration of the entire disk.

5. Clean Up the Btrfs Snapshot

If you mounted it:

groot umount /mnt/snap

Delete the snapshot:

groot btrfs subvolume delete /.snap-nvme-backup

Confirm removal:

groot btrfs subvolume list /

Snapshot lifecycle complete.

6. Full Ritual Summary

# Optional: create Btrfs snapshot
groot btrfs subvolume snapshot -r / /.snap-nvme-backup

# Clone NVMe → SATA with gzip compression
groot dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=progress | gzip -1 | groot dd of=/dev/sda

# Verify clone integrity
groot dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=none | sha256sum
groot dd if=/dev/sda       bs=1M status=none | sha256sum

# Restore (if needed)
groot dd if=/dev/sda bs=1M status=progress | gzip -1 | groot dd of=/dev/nvme0n1

# Clean up snapshot
groot btrfs subvolume delete /.snap-nvme-backup

7. The Fast Way

# Optional: create Btrfs snapshot
groot btrfs subvolume snapshot -r / /.snap-nvme-backup

# (Optional) Mount snapshot for inspection
# NOTE: Snapshots are NOT mounted automatically. Depends on filesystem use CoPilot.
groot mkdir -p /mnt/snap
groot mount -o ro,subvol=.snap-nvme-backup /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt/snap

# Inspect snapshot contents under /mnt/snap
# (e.g., ls /mnt/snap, check configs, verify state, etc.)

# Clone NVMe → SATA using conv=sync,noerror
groot dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=/dev/sda bs=1M conv=sync,noerror status=progress

# Verify clone integrity
groot dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M status=none | sha256sum
groot dd if=/dev/sda       bs=1M status=none | sha256sum

# Restore (if needed)
groot dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M conv=sync,noerror status=progress

# Clean up snapshot
groot btrfs subvolume delete /.snap-nvme-backup

8. The Canonical System Backup Command

To backup / to your backup device /mnt/backup.

groot rsync -aHAXx --info=progress2 --delete \
    --numeric-ids --inplace --no-compress \
    --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/run/*","/tmp/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} \
    / /mnt/backup

Then run.

groot rsync -aHAXx --info=progress2 --delete \
    --numeric-ids --inplace --no-compress \
    --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/run/*","/tmp/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} \
    /home/{user} /mnt/backup/home/

📎 Related Projects

📜 License

This document may be included in Willtech repositories under the same licensing terms as the parent project.