Ability to backup an image to the same disk where RescueZilla is

[Shine753]

I have rescueZilla on a 64 Gb USB stick using Ventoy.
But when launched (from "disk" or into memory), RescueZilla refuses to allow me to select this USB stick to save the backup image.
Can this be allowed, so we don't need 2 USB ports to make backups/restores ?

[shasheene]

I thought "Load Into USB" "Load USB into RAM" allows this to work? Regardless, this feature has been requested before:

#8
#288

The work is mainly testing overhead for user-safety.

As people may have noticed I unfortunately haven't had much time to focus on Rescuezilla so far in 2022.

[Shine753]

I guess you meant "Load USB into RAM" :)
Well, that doesn't work, contrary to what has been said in #288.
Could you explain in a few words why a persistent partition should be needed to store the images onto the Boot USB. Isn't it a storage device like the others ? On which an application will simply write files ? No matter if the app was launch from it or from elsewhere.

[shasheene]

For safety reasons Rescuezilla doesn't allow the disk it was booted from to be used as either the source or the destination.

This makes sense when booted from a DVD or standard USB stick.

This makes less sense for Ventoy using a persistent region, and for other types of persistent environments (eg, unpacking onto USB stick using Rufus to provide a persistent partition).

The workaround was to use 'Load USB into RAM' to trick Rescuezilla into thinking it was not booted from the source USB stick, which provides a workaround to this overzealous user-safety protection.

[Shine753]

For safety reasons Rescuezilla doesn't allow the disk it was booted from to be used as either the source or the destination.
This makes sense when booted from a DVD or standard USB stick.

Well, that does not make sense to me.
When I launch any portable app from an USB stick, I can write to the USB stick.
When I launch an application from a DVD, it tells me that the DVD is write protected.
And I don't see any security reason to write a disk image to the media where the app was launched : just and only concerns about disk space, write protection, and source media to image. That also applies to any other external media.
So what did I miss ?

[shasheene]

User "jacob m" writes

I boot Rescuezilla from the same flash drive I use for backup and restore.

Install Ventoy with enough space left at the end of the drive for the images you want to store (it's one of the config options). Create a new exfat partition in that space for your images. Put a partition label on it that makes it easy to identify from the Rescuezilla GUI. Select that as your backup destination or restore source.

[mikmikmikmik]

nope, cannot get this to work.
load usb into ram may be OK if the USB is rescuezilla installation, but does not work when called from ventoy as an iso.
crud. I will take my head outta my butt and create another partition on the ventoy, that'll be 3 partitions in total, 1 - the ventoy boot efi, the second is the ventoy main where the latest rescuezilla iso was copied to, and the third where the backups will be.

so ventoyefi is the last (3rd) partition, and there seems to be no way to resize the first partition without deleting it and recreating it, and when I do that to 10GB on a 256GB stick, copy rescuezilla.iso to it, then create partition 2 between them to backup the steamdeck, when I reboot into ventoy, i only get to the grub menu.

I have had to go back to installing rescuezilla into the USB stick via balena etcher, creating a 2nd partition for the rest of the stick, and then loading resuezilla i to ram on rebbot, and now I can ope partition2 as a valid save location.

all the above is moot. all sorted now.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/doc_non_destructive.html