Author: sajolida Date: To: Tails user experience & user interface design Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] Backups of the persistent volume
> Lawrie: >> My idea to reiterate is just to _clone the whole complete memory stick -
>> from start to finish - with one click._ Then if you loose the first one
>> you have the second one. From a coding and security aspect it would
>> appear to be pretty simple - but there again I don't know much about
>> this sort of thing. Maybe it's not simple at all?
>
> As always there are multiple ways to achieve the same effect, but I'm
> also uncertain which one to choose.
> One could, for instance, make a 1:1 copy of all partitions on the USB
> stick (like when using dd), or make only a 1:1 copy of the (read only)
> Tails system, create a new encrypted partition, and copy/rsync the data
> from the old partition to the new one.
> In the first example, one would get two bit-equal USB sticks (including
> the encrypted partition with its passphrase-encrypted session key) and
> in the latter example, the USB sticks look different (new session key)
> but contain the same data (after the partition is unlocked).
For the system partition, we should reuse the code of the current "Clone
& Install" action of Tails Installer.
For the persistent volume, I would be tempted to propose to open both
persistent volumes and do an rsync, as doing a bit-by-bit copy will most
likely be prone to fail across USB sticks of different models and
different vendors (they might not *really* have the same exact size).