I know about Clonezilla and copy pasting partitions with gparted, but can I just use dd to copy a partition with batocera to a USB stick and will it then boot from the stick? Do I have to set the boot flag or take any other steps?
Thank you for any tips.
First tar up your filesystem. You can use gzip to save space. Once that’s done copy it over. Make sure you use a good filesystem on the USB device that isn’t going to cause data loss. (ie not fat)
Keep in mind that you can’t do this live and that copying the archive over will take time and the drive may lie to you. Its always best practice to run sync or eject before unplugging.
Wait why can’t I do it live? Thanks for the tips.
Because it is in use. You technically can hot swap a file system by switching run levels and temporarily switching to a tmpfs but I’ve never succeeded.