How to backup the whole system

Hi,

I’m quite new with Qubes, I installed it on my Lenovo notebook with ryzen 7 pro APU. I have some issues with it, so I want to experiment with other kernel versions and amd driver, but there is a big chance to brick my system. What is the best way to prepare for it?

I read the manual about backup but I dont like the idea that I need to reinstall the whole system and recover from VM backups.
Wouldn’t it be much easier to boot up with a live debian and dd the whole drive? Then if I need to recover, I just dd it back again.
What’s your opinion about it?

There was recent thread on exactly this issue.
dd on the whole drive is just not efficient.
If you are just experimenting, then install to a small partition and
take an image of that. As soon as you start working in Qubes, even if
you are still experimenting, you will need some decent data backup, and
your disk image wont save you nay time.

For your particular use case (one time experiments with uncertain result) I’d say that your approach (dd backup and re-image) is perfectly fine.
I use similar backup strategies for one-time experiments.

For regular backups there are several topics in this forum, as @unman already mentioned. The topic he refers to should be How do you organize your backups? - #11 by unman.