
Clonezilla: Disk Imaging and Cloning - type0
http://clonezilla.org/
======
paulmd
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.

~~~
ComodoHacker
Looks like Free edition is not offered anymore.

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

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lkozloff
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.

~~~
aomix
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.

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itomato
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.

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j_s
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](http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/52684)

Edit: Apparently a sparse VM disk works:

[http://serverfault.com/a/47075](http://serverfault.com/a/47075)

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

~~~
devopsproject
> 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

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pfarnsworth
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>

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rahrahrah
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.

~~~
jamessb
Perhaps you meant to comment on this thread instead?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13128518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13128518)

~~~
rahrahrah
Hah indeed :-/

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cpach
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?

~~~
PhantomGremlin
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.

~~~
cpach
Really solid advice. Thanks a lot!

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jaytaylor
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.

~~~
brokenmachine
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?

