Like I said, I have a timestamps recorder that records all timestamps including created at and changed at and would accept them in that format. I can get created at and changed at with stat so like my system does support them. I am willing to try debugfs as long as I have a good backup. Who knows, maybe I discover it works well. I have not found any other way and all ext4 I know of does support created at and changed at just not directly setting them. I have debugfs installed by default and I know at least saving like my timestamps is safe. I use ls, stat, and other things in like my program. If that breaks system, system already needs fixing. All as per one might be maybe or might not be maybe, maybe or maybe not, maybe.

IsaacKuo, I was asking if you were like on a bootable USB system and backing up like main drive and I am still unsure if you answerred that maybe or maybe not, maybe. Also, I can mount a USB as /mnt/... so like in / so not same as internal storage but similar and throws me maybe or maybe not, maybe.

Oh, I misunderstood your question entirely. I thought you meant backing up the bootable USB system itself, while running the USB system.

But to your actual question:

Yes. I have booted up to a USB drive in order to perform "offline" backups of an internal OS drive. It's dead easy that way.

I rarely do it nowadays, since I have become comfortable with doing "online" rsync backups of OS drives (internal or external).

Nowadays, I'll only boot up to a USB drive to perform operations like resizing/moving an OS partition, or changing its file system. You can't do that on the currently active OS partition.

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