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I'm dualbooting Windows 10 and Linux Mint.

Is it possible to do a file based backup of the Windows System Partition using Linux?

UEFI is already entirely file based and not bound to the MBR of the disk.

[edit: the UEFI boot process is independ of the MBR. Thus im not in the need of backing up the MBR like it used to be when using BIOS systems.]

My question is whether the boot process after loading the bootloader from the EFI-partition is entirely file based too on the windows site.

The workflow would be the following for the backup (booting linux):

  1. Back up the files of the EFI-Partition
  2. Back up the files of the Windows Partition
  3. Back up the files of the Recovery Partition

to restore the following needs no be done:

  1. boot Linux live cd. start gparted.
  2. create an empty fat partition. Set the correct flags.
  3. copy the EFI files to that partition.
  4. create a recovery Partition
  5. copy the Recovery Files to that partition.
  6. create an ntfs-Partition.
  7. copy the windows files to that partition.
  8. boot from windows usb recovery media
  9. Fix the bootloader on the EFI-Partion using bcdboot
  10. Repair windows recovery using reagentc

At least for the recovery and efi partition part I can tell that this works because I once deleted and restored it from files this way.

I already did the steps above copying partitions with gparted when moving the system to a new drive. The partitions got new UUIDs and new positions. With bcdboot/reagentc I could repair the EFI- and recovery partitions afterwards to boot successfully.

Will this work with file-copies, too? Is there something "inside a windows partition" that is not visible when observing the files on the drive.

I dont want to copy the whole partition because I want to do automated incremental backups with rsync on a btrfs disk. File based could save a lot of time there for me.

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    UEFI does not make sense in this context (it's not a disk partitioning schema). I think you mean GPT, since you are comparing UEFI to MBR, that would make the most sense.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 9, 2020 at 19:37
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    Doesn't it make more sense to take an image backup of the whole disk, rather than jumping through so many hoops?
    – harrymc
    Nov 9, 2020 at 19:41
  • @harrymc I think OP's goal is to have a non-proprietary incremental backup solution. I haven't heard of a non-proprietary disk image format yet (sparse files would work I guess) and I'm not aware of any open source imaging tools that support incremental images.
    – gronostaj
    Nov 9, 2020 at 20:33

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Yes, but it won't work for you.

NTFS permissions are essential for post-Vista Windows versions to work correctly and you can't preserve these on *NIX-like filesystems like btrfs. You need NTFS (maybe ReFS would work too, I'm not sure).

Good news is that Windows has a mechanism called Shadow Copy which is ideal for incremental backup. A lot of backup solutions is based on it. I'm personally using Veeam Agent (it's free for basic use cases). Maybe you could do with incremental DISM files too if you'd like to avoid 3rd-party solutions. Here's a DISM megatutorial.

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  • Thank you very much. I totally forgot about NTFS permissions.
    – hansen
    Nov 9, 2020 at 19:52

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