Usb Restorer

This repo contains a documentation on how to create and use a usb key for restoring a linux system.

TODO: Adding instructions to restore a windows system.

Create usb key

For a tutorial, follow this post from sebsauvage (in French) Make sure your usb key is formatted in Fat32.
To create a restoring usb key, download linux mint lightweight iso, and install multibootusb.
Launch multibootusb and choose the usb key on which you want to install the restoring system, select the iso, and in the MultibootUsb tab add some persistence memory, I recommand the maximum 4GB and click on install distro.

Now you restart your computer and start on the usb key, git clone this repo and launch install.sh scripts, this script will install all the needed packages for restoring a linux computer. Be careful by default the keyboard is setup to french layout

Restoration tools

Access an luks encrypted disk

Use cryptsetup to open a volume into a folder.

sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/XXXX my_encrypted_volume
sudo mount /dev/mapper/my_encrypted_volume /mnt

To lock the volume again, unmount and crypt the volume.

sudo umount /mnt
sudo cryptsetup luksClose my_encrypted_volume

Access a veracrypt encrypted disk

Use veracrypt application to decrypt and mount the folder / disk.

Mount a disk / folder

Create the directory where the disk or folder will be mounted and mount it into this directory.

sudo mount /dev/XXXX /mnt

Unmount a disk / folder

sudo umount /mnt

Having root access into a disk / filesystem

You need to mount system, proc, dev, sys to the usb key system to have access to the filesystem root.

sudo mount /dev/XXXX /mnt
sudo mount --bind   /dev               /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind   /run               /mnt/run
sudo mount --bind   /sys               /mnt/sys
sudo mount --bind   /etc/resolv.conf   /mnt/etc/resolv.conf
sudo mount -t proc /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount -t sysfs /sys /mnt/sys

If grub reparation is needed you need to add:

sudo mount --bind /run  /mnt/run

And after to have access into the system use chroot:

sudo chroot /mnt

If you have some problem with zsh or others specify bash binary.

sudo chroot /mnt /bin/bash

Backup a disk / folder

For this you can use fsarchiver, partclone, rclone and borg.

sudo borg init --encryption=none /mnt/backup.borg
borg create -v --stats --progress --exclude-from="filepath.txt" /backup/backup::{now} /

Exclude-backup.txt

/proc
/sys
/dev
/media
/mnt
/cdrom
/tmp
/run
/var/tmp
/var/run
/home/*/.thumbnails
/home/*/.cache/chromium
/home/*/.cache/mozilla
/home/*/.cache/wine
/home/*/.steam/steam/steamapps
/home/*/.steam/steam/config/htmlcache
/home/*/.local/share/Trash
/home/*/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/Cache
/home/*/.gvfs
/swapfile
*.!qB

Deleting file

You can delete file with a secure standard thanks to secure-delete.