There should be no need as the backup should restore the whole filesystem … that said, it won’t hurt if you do and IIRC those SSD’s come without a partition table at all so can’t hurt 
Re #31 above I found the cause of that message to be an out-of-date UUID in etc/fstab. When mkswap is run the UUID gets changed which I found out when tying to figure out why fdisk -l was not listing the swap partition (type 82) as such. As soon as I had updated fstab as well the initramfs config.d file with the correct UUID for the boot time sped up and the message went away.
Finally I used the desktop Disk utility to relabel the swap partition from type 83 (Linux system) to type 82 (Linux swap / Solaris so now fdisk -l lists the partitions correctly even though prior to that swapon -s confirmed it to be a swap partition.
Probably fairly obvious stuff but I’ve got to learn somehow as well as stop digging holes for myself. Having said that I now have a super fast, super talented ZG5!
Terrific, and well done … That’s what one of the thingsI like about Linux, you can dig around in it to your hearts content learning continuously, it’s all just a bunch of readable config files 