Clonezilla: Disk Imaging and Cloning | Hacker News Reader

Clonezilla: Disk Imaging and Cloning

clonezilla.org

69 pointstype025 comments

Please read the list of "limitations" on that page. Macrium Reflect Free has none of them, and is my choice of programs for cloning disks across nowadays.

I don't want to besmirch the name of someone's good work of course. But I used Clonezilla a couple years ago and it was antiquated in both interface and features compared to Reflect. A live image and a resize while doing an intelligent copy of the actual in-use data (vs a whole-disk forensic image) is absolutely no problem. It's by far the easiest thing I've ever used for disk-to-disk clones and imaging.

Clonezilla takes a solid knowledge of Linux even to get the job done in many cases, it's not full featured, and I found it was not particularly solid on my hardware. I preferred the plain Ubuntu LiveCD versus it, or at a minimum SystemRescueCD if you insisted on a rescue-oriented livesystem.

Neither tool used 7zip/p7zip to hit maximum compression, but it's easy either way. You do that later on your fileserver.

I moved to Macrium after using Clonezilla for ages. For Windows imaging you really want something that'll use Shadow Copy so it can do the image while the machine is in use.

I'd argue that the interface for setting up incremental backups could be better, and scheduled tasks can result in an unkillable prompt - when my laptop isn't on my LAN, I don't want the backups to run at all.

Biggest limitation of macrium is that it runs on windows only.

Looks like Free edition is not offered anymore.

It's still there, but might have been obscured from the front page: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

(I used it about a month ago to attempt to clone a failing drive after Clonezilla choked and died horribly. It got significantly further, not sure if going to it first would've helped more.)

No love for fsarchiver? http://www.fsarchiver.org/

AOMEI Partition Assistant Lite probably falls in the same category, claiming to be the only commercial tool that can resize partitions that is free for commercial use. I've used it to shrink partitions that Windows couldn't due to system files in use.

http://www.disk-partition.com/partition-assistant-lite.html

Macrium Reflect is superb.

Last year when migrating to a new HDD I cloned the Windows partition using Clonezilla, just to be met with BSOD immediately. I wasted 2 days trying to figure out what's the problem, Windows boot recovery, driver injection etc. After 2 days I created a Macrium Reflect live media, cloned the original partition again with it and voila! Windows booted successfully in the first try.

I'll never use Clonezilla again because I value my time.

Equally confused about why this is on the front page, but happy to shower CZ with love. (And reap the knowledge benefits of people saying "we use another similar tool that is better for reason X")

We're a linux-mostly environment and CZ has been absolutely great for our IT staff in standardizing our desktop images. We use USB images that starts the cloning process automagically on boot.

We've had mixed results using CZ over the network for cloning (PXE boot).

All in all though, it's been a great tool to have and we're very grateful for it.

You can't beat Clonezilla for personal or small scale use. It's pretty basic compared to other tools but that also lets it be dead simple to use. I've migrated or restored so many systems with it I can't remember the last time I had to do a from scratch reinstall.

Huge, potentially error-prone transfers, thanks to the image-based approach of CZ.

Over ten years old (like Clonezilla) SystemImager does it better with rsync and file-based imaging. No support for Windows, so maybe that's the 'killer feature' of CZ.

The one internet link I will always regret losing was a tool to mount PartImage's bzip-compressed/sparse images as a virtual drive...

I've tried to find it again several times to no avail. I have a bunch of backups that I would be interested in accessing without having to restore to disk in their entirety (as explained below):

http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/52684

Edit: Apparently a sparse VM disk works:

http://serverfault.com/a/47075

Why is this on the front page? People have been using CZ forever. I thought we were beyond this now

> I thought we were beyond this now

karma. people assign a lot of value to their fake internet points and posting\reposting popular things is great way to get them

It's weird this is on the front page, but I recently used it to transfer my NTFS SSD onto a larger SSD. Worked perfectly, as far as I can tell <cue ominous music>

Just a reminder that you shouldn't actually use this tool if you're even half serious about protecting yourself on a public wifi. Use Tails instead.

Perhaps you meant to comment on this thread instead? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13128518

Hah indeed :-/

I'm about to clone my Mac's HDD before having it repaired. Is there anyone who would like to comment on how Clonezilla compares to Superduper?

Disk Utility will make an image of your drive and is built into the system. I've been using in for over a decade now.

These programs have a much different philosophy, though they essentially do the same thing. Clonezilla copies every single active disk block in a partition, while SuperDuper copies most of the files.

I have never used Clonezilla.

I haven't used SuperDuper in a few years, but when I did use it I had no problems. I switched to Carbon Copy Cloner because it had a few more features. However, you need to pay for CCC (there is a free trial). SD is completely free if you just want to clone entire disks, and you only need to pay if you want extra features.

When I say that CCC and SD copy "most" of the files, what I mean is they attempt to be smart. E.g. they omit files in a .Trash directory, and they omit various cache and temporary files.

IMO if your data is important to you, then you should clone it to two separate drives from your Mac's HDD. Which means you can use the free SD and the trial CCC and make one clone with each. Better safe than sorry.

Even at that, whenever I make full backups I like to use an independent method to check that the data is correct. Previously I used to do something like this at the root of both the source and the destination:

   find -x \
        . \
        -type f -print0 \
        | xargs -0 -n 100 -x md5 \
        | sort > /tmp/manifest.source

I would then compare the two result files and see what was copied. Unfortunately that tends to be noisy because as I mentioned not all files are copied. I eventually wound up writing a Python script instead of that shell script. My Python script helps cut down on the noise by e.g. not checksumming files in .Trash directories.

I would much rather trust a program like CCC than Clonezilla. The CCC developer is very responsive to email and to bug reports. His program exists to make backups of Mac partitions. He doesn't need to worry about reiserfs, btrfs, ntfs, etc. Instead he spends his time worrying about quirks in OS X, nee macOS. And that's all. I trust him to get it right because that's his livelihood.

Really solid advice. Thanks a lot!

Clonezilla: Never again.

I tried Clonezilla out back in September on my Windows machine, which was running fine at the time.

I never asked or specified that Clonezilla change a single byte on the drive.

After a failed attempt to backup to a network volume, I found that Windows booted into a black screen with a mouse cursor, and nothing else.

Windows repair didn't fix it. I ended up just buying a whole new SSD and moving on, but wow.

Used it for years doing desktop images, and never an issue. The setup can be a bit unintuitive at times, but that seems excessive.

I'd be willing to bet there was some other issue.

Also, you needed to buy a whole new SSD? You are aware that an SSD is rewritable, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com