They really shot themselves in the foot by going straight to phones.
The better way would have been to work on tablets first and working out all the bugs on larger devices with a limited feature set before moving into phones with the attendant issues of regional cell bands and restrictions.
Rather than play the “will this product work on Linux” game I bought an enclosure and made my own. I got an Orico enclosure and put a large HDD into it.
Most enclosures are OS agnostic (but check anyway) and you can put quite large drives in them.
I wouldn’t consider it a backup solution, I use Timeshift for that.
It’s more of a file syncing software like Syncthing.
I have it set up to one way sync certain folders on my computer to an external USB HDD that I can disconnect and take with me if I have to evacuate.
Have you had a look at “Lucky Backup”?
Logitech does not support Linux.
Most of the current compatibility of Logitech devices comes from, Linux devs reverse engineering their software, USB standards or from default programing stored in the device.
Have you considered that they may have used a 32bit UEFI bios combined with 64bit processor?
Try a distro that supports 32bit UEFI.
About 25 years for me.
For most people it’s a better option to use a local print shop for the odd times that they need something printed.
More options for printing too.
Have you tried running the laptop down until it shuts off then charging it?
Install RockBox onto it and continue using it as a music player.
Edit: apparently this is a device that can’t use RockBox.
It’s not so much both computers being able to access it.
From what I have experienced Timeshift tends to lock a drive when it is doing a backup.
If computer 1 is doing a backup and computer 2 tries to start it’s backup it may fail without you noticing.
Giving each computer their own partition on the drive should alleviate the problem.
A partition for each one the drive should work alright, but it may turn to custard if they both try to access the drive at the same time.
You should be able to highlight the ones that you want to remove then click on the delete button.
From what I understand is that each backup is just the difference between the original backup and the current system.
Have a look at XNview MP
I can definitely say that it is avery good photo management program.
I am only using about 20% of it’s features and it is my go to image software.
What I do is start up Firefox first to create all the first start files then close it and delete everything in the Firefox folder then copy across everything from the original pc.
Seems to work alright.
I have had several distros working on the X205TA (I even had a how to guide written up on reddit years ago).
But I was not able to get a usable system (i.e. being able to use the system without waiting on average 20-120 sec for the device to process an action).
Life has gotten to the point that the effort to do so is better directed into activities that I would enjoy.
To be brutally honest about this, your best bet is to recycle the unit.
The problems of trying to get a distro to install properly, have all the hardware working right and have a usable experience are not worth the minimal upsides.
I have an ASUS X205TA which is a similar unit and after trying for countless hours to get a usable device out of it was not going to be worth the headaches plus if I was getting paid for the time I spent on it I could have brought an off lease laptop with better specs.
I have an LTS kernel as a backup in case something doesn’t work with my main kernel.
Just recently I had an issue where my main kernel had a bug where snap’s can’t start up, so I just restarted into the LTS kernel to use it then restarted back into my main kernel.
Hannah Montana Linux
If you can, get yourself a wireless access point instead.
You can connect the computer by ethernet to the access point that then connects to the WiFi network.
By having the device separate you can have it situated away from the computer for better connection and the computer only sees a wired connection.
Plus they tend to be more stable than dongles.
The hardware isn’t so much of a problem as there are companies who can make or source compatible tablets like the PineTab2 and the PineNote.
It’s making the software compatible with a lower power mobile device and learning what needs to fixed.
It would have been much easier to deal with getting a tablet up and running before dealing with getting a mobile device functional.
Making the small steps from laptop to tablet then to phone would have saved them a lot of grief and software mistakes.