I am trying to create a disk image of my current drive to an external drive as a backup.
The external drive is formatted and has a partition, all done in Disks
I selected the 256GBdrive, clicked on hamburger menu , selected Create Disk Image, selected the 500GB drive (Matt), clicked on **Start Creating **and here are the results of my efforts.
What to do, what to do, any clues?
Thanks, Fred
Looks like it needs to unmount the source filesystem to create the image, but it can’t, presumably because that’s your boot drive? Maybe boot to another drive, like even a live USB session and create the image from there?
@elcste
I agree, but Disks implies is capable of the operation. Almost all programs that won't let you do something grey out those options. Even Disks has lots of items greyed out.
I agree it could be clearer, but I think Disks doesn’t “know” it can’t do it until you try. It would have to constantly check every partition to see if it’s ready to do each operation, which is hard since you could be inserting a disk, removing it, copying things or whatever at the same time.
As I see it it this is a shortcoming of the package. It surely "knows" what /dev's are mounted and it could get around the problem, by creating a small virtual machine in RAM, sucking over the resources it needs, umount the drive and then create the image. But I am known for asking too much.
I resorted to Clonezilla to handle it.
Cheers, Fred
