So I should have installed the grub on the USB?. So, what serves clonezilla? I always thought it was an annoyance but now I think it's useless -- at least for a rookie is totally useless.

As I said, the solution is in something like Mxlinux-Snapshot!

Greetings.

I faced something like this before, and it was a moderate pain for me. You want to clone the OS, but there are other partitions which you do not wish to clone.

I ended up installing grub onto a thumbstick and making the remainder of that stick a general Linux (type 83) partition type, and like an ext2 filesystem, that made it like /dev/sd<something>2 where the first partition was the grub boot partition.

Then cloned the OS using the dd command and the of= was that second partition. Then I had to edit the grub.cfg to point to that partition (sorry it was a long time ago and I do not know how I accomplished that), from there I had a master disk for that Linux which would be bootable. To duplicate it became a worse problem because that was when I learned that not all 8G sticks are identical, some are larger or smaller than others. I'll skip the solution there, that first solution above seems what you need. Maybe read up on grub configuration to figure out how to control it so it can see or detect the OS copied to the other partition on the media.

A couple things that have not been mentioned.

OP, you are likely booting from a live clonezilla image, which is exactly as has been mentioned in that you should never copy (clone or dd) from a mounted active file system to prevent corruption. In my use of clonezilla it refuses to clone from a mounted device

Secondly, clonezilla copies the data and the partition information, but does not copy the entire partition byte by byte. Using dd, OTOH, copies the entire partition byte by byte and the output image will be exactly the size of the input device.

I did a clone of my install SSD (250 GB) using clonezilla and the output was ~36 GB. There is a major difference in the way the copy is made when comparing clonezilla and dd.

The clone will not be bootable, but can be restored and make a bootable restore IIF you clone a full bootable device and not just one partition from that device. Clonezilla is also able to do a restore of a clone it has created only to a device that is equal to or larger than the source device.

The red entry above appears appropriate for a EFI system partition...
Formatted Fat32, around the recommended 300MB in size.
To do this properly, the USB key should have a partition of same size or larger than the partition being cloned over.
Then the dd command should be: sudo dd if=/dev/nvme0n1p7 of=/dev/sdb1
Then boot into the OS on the computer drive that has os-prober installed and run command:
sudo update-grub (for Debian based distro)
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg (for Fedora, Centos, OpenMandriva etc.)
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg (for most any other more recent distro)

This should add the key's grub.cfg entries to it's menu, and you boot it from there.
If you want a UEFI boot entry for the key, you would need to chroot into the key with internet from another live Linux or the installed OS and install grub.

Once in the chroot, mount the EFI system partition (/dev/nvmeon1p1) to the key's /boot/efi directory and install grub:
sudo grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi
sudo dnf reinstall grub2-efi shim ---> Can use this for Fedora, Centos, OpenMandriva etc.
sudo grub-install /dev/nvme0n1p1 ---> Debian base

Since it is a clone of the installed OS, there is no need to reinstall grub in the key to add it to the UEFI boot menu, the installed OS already has that covered and you boot it from it's menu, if you reinstall grub-efi in the key, it will need to be plugged in if you want to boot the installed OS because the last OS you use to install grub is the menu you need to use to boot the other.

I do this every day...
It's that easy with either UEFI or Legacy BIOS "primary" partitions. Rearrange partition order, copy an OS partition to a Virtual drive and boot it as a VM, move VM's to hard drive etc.
However, there may be an issue with two Identical partitions with same UUID, it may be necessary to change the UUID of the key partition and run update-grub in the key in a chroot prior to adding it to the other's boot menu,

Thank you all of you ... but it's still ...

Would not it be more convenient for the least trained than someone to facilitate how to install this application in Debian: MX-Snapshot-Main

https://github.com/mx-linux/mx-snapshot.

Not advisable.

Here's how I would install that in Debian:
Fire up VMWare-Player, use my generic Linux that don't have anything installed yet. All I do with this VM is change the Live CD and boot it. Can be Fedora, 2 minutes later it's Ubutu etc.

Then you can use MX-Live CD in Debian. You can run a thousand different Linux and their "special" programs in Debian.

If Cloning Debian is your goal, likely won't be able to do it with MX-Live CD.
If you want a custom Debian Live, something like what you've got running, you should use live-build, and build it to your liking.

I'm still holding on to my last one because it's so awesome, Buster, when it was the Testing branch.

This issue has been much discussed before, please if you wish to see that there are possibilities read the entire following thread:

https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=146083

I tried to install it by myself but my poor understanding didn't make it easy to follow the correct path, I couldn't follow the directions and got glitches ...


Thanks

Been running Debian since Woody.
When you do something like that, you end up creating a new LQ member and start asking questions from around the other side of the curve of the road and eventually come to ask why your Debian is broken.

1 members found this post helpful.

In that case probably you need to document all the steps you made and all the responses. And we can give you better help to keep on the right track....

Good, i will try it again but ... i should open a new thread.

I do understand there's a challenge with language translation here.

Maybe you should consider focusing on this - "every time it gets damaged" What the [BEEP] are you doing so often to have your system get damaged every time, so frequently? I have Debian on 2 systems and antiX (Debian derivative) on another 2 and haven't had to reinstall them since I installed them -- when Buster was in testing, now running Bullseyes.

But that's me and my systems. If my systems needed frequent repairing, I'd try to figure out how to stop the damage as a priority. If you can't maintain a system, cloning and restoration might be a challenge.

Obviously an adequate backup is tantamount to system maintenance.

Debian has extensive documentation in different languages https://www.debian.org/doc/user-manuals
From basics to admin reference to securing your system, maybe not as convenient... but more practical.