My dear lemmings,
I discovered Clonezilla a while ago and it still is my main tool to backup and restore the partitions I care about on my computers.
I cannot help but wonder if there are now better, more efficient alternatives or is it still a solid choice? There’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just curious about others’ practices and habits — and if there was newer tools or solutions available.
Thank you for your feedback, and keep your drives safe!
for a large drive with only partial data you can make dd quicker by reducing partition size. Then fdisk to list byte size of (cylinders x bytes) in header output, and units listed for end of partition. you then use dd with bs=(cyl x bytes) count=(units+1) so dd stops at the last block of partition. once copied you can resize partition. it is how I fit a duplicate of my nas OS img on a 4 gig USB stick img for redeploy. DD is faster and then resize partitions after
That… seems pretty unsafe. If I’m taking a backup, I definitely would avoid resizing it or making any modifications to it during the backup process. What if the resize fails and is the reason you need to restore from backup in the first place?
I guess it’s a handy hack in use cases like yours, or if the backup is a convenience, but it’s important to understand the risks and whether you’re better off with filesystem level tools.
You’d probably be better off with dd if=/dev/zero of=file.zero to zero out empty space, dd copy the whole drive, then compress the copy. I wouldn’t fuck around with partitions on something I want to back up
For sure, but in my case I didn’t want a copressed copy, I wanted a working fully functional drive image
Probably safer to image the whole partition then shrink the image, then. Not sure exactly how I’d go about it, but I’m sure it’s not too bad, probably three arcane shell commands