LostXOR

I think a two disk dual boot is safe. I’ve had that setup for a while and Windows hasn’t broken anything yet (though I only use it maybe once a month).

Seems like a reasonable donation prompt; it’s infrequent, unobtrusive, and can be easily dismissed and disabled. Some people are so sensitive to the idea of any sort of soliciting that they forget projects do need money to function.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a backup! There’s always the possibility of screwing something up, no matter how careful you are (or your hard drive deciding to spontaneously self destruct).

No need for all these new-fangled tools when good ol’ dd does the job just fine. (Though they certainly reduce the chance of accidentally nuking the wrong disk).

SSHing into my less powerful machines takes a good few seconds, so I’m not sure if I’d notice an extra 500ms. For the more powerful ones that are basically instant it would be much more noticeable.

I had to pipe dd through gzip over SSH recently to locally image a disk on a cloud server. That was fun.