Nine

I used to do this all the time! So in terms of speed bcache is the fastest, but it’s not as well supported as lvm cache. IMHO lvm cache is plenty fast enough for most uses.

Is it going to be as fast as a NVME ssd? Nope. But it should be about as fast as a SATA ssd if not a little slower depending on how it’s getting the data. If you’re willing to take that trade off it’s worth it. Though anything already cached is going to be accessed at NVME speeds.

So it’s totally worth it if you need bigger storage but can’t afford the SSD. I would go bigger in your HDD though, if you can. Because unless you’re accessing more than the capacity of your SSD frequently; the caching will work extremely well for both reads and writes. So your steam games will feel like they’re on a SSD, most of the time, and everything else you do will “feel” snappy too.

MacOS, nearly everyone who does anything with development or ops is using a MacBook. Though lately more “normal” employees have been getting MacBooks too.

Yeah that was my thoughts too. It’s not like it can’t be bypassed but it’s not “easy.” This is kinda how I see it going for commercial 3D printers. It’s not a bad thing either. I’ve always been a fan of making people earn dangerous knowledge & skills. Even in fictional universes like Star Trek there’s restrictions on using a replicator to make weapons.

So it’s not unreasonable, imho, to put some kind of guard rails up that force people to actively bypass restrictions in making weapons.

The trick will be telling the difference between making a nerf gun, action figure guns, and an actual weapon. That I don’t see being possible at this time. Too many edge cases that don’t neatly fit.

To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.

To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.

Restic

Like everyone has said there’s way better ways of doing it.

HOWEVER if you wanted to use dd you totally could. I’d recommend piping into something like gzip/zstd to save some space though.

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip >/mnt/backup_disk/sda.gz

You could also use restic backup the raw block device too.

That being said, clonezilla is exactly what you want