Welcome to BestBackup.site. Today we are going to review the Clonezilla, a powerful disk cloning tool. When you need to create a copy of your disk for backup or even you are planning to clone your hard disk, you will need a disk cloning software. In open source world, we have Clonezilla. Its a free, disaster recovery software that can be used to clone single drive or partitions. The cloned data can be stored as an image file or you can also duplicate your drive to another drive directly. You can save the cloned data (disks or partitions) in the local disk/internal disk, external disk, network shares (Samba, NFS or via SSH). Clonezilla runs on its own environment and it does not need installation.
Clonezilla is an efficient, networkable, piece of software that can clone a single machine or up to forty machines simultaneously.(Techrepublic.com)
Clonezilla Backup Destinations
Since version 2.4.2, it supports Amazon S3 repository. You can read the official announcement here. This mean, Clonezilla is ready to face the new Cloud Backup trend. But, is also supports local disk, external disk, network shares, SSH, NFS.
Clonezilla Features
Not like most backup or hard disk cloning software, Clonezilla does not have a fancy GUI. But, don’t worry, it comes with a backup wizard style that very easy to follow. Here are some features of Clonezilla:
- Support many file systems including: NTFS, EXT4, EXT3, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs and many more
- LVM2 support
- One Image can be used to restore to multiple devices
- Support Image Encryption
- AES-256 encryption
Pros
- The fact that it supports many file system and backup destinations are great things to consider when looking for good backup software.
- Also, it can be used to backup multiple computers up to 40 machines simultaneously.
- Now support Amazon S3 as the backup destination
Cons
- For some people, the user interface is still too difficult. If you are expecting a backup software with few clicks support, Clonezilla is not for you.
- Does not support single file or folder restoration.
- No incremental backup supported
- Online imaging is not supported yet
- Due to the image format limitation. The image cannot be mounted or explored. In other word, you cannot select specific file to restore from the backup image.
How to use Clonezilla to Backup your Computer
The following walkthrough will show you how to backup and create a disk image of your local disk.
Step 1. Download the latest ISO file.
You can download the latest ISO from this official link.
Step 2. Prepare your backup drive
Since we are going to create a disk image, you will need to have a drive (we recommend external drive) that has free space large enough to hold the backup. If you are planning to save the backup image in the network drive such as NAS or Samba Server, make sure you have sufficient space. The insufficient space on the backup destination will lead to unsuccessful backup process.
Step 2. Boot your computer with the ISO
We recommend you to create Clonezilla Live USB to boot your computer from. You can use free tool such as Rufus or Ethcer to create Live USB from Windows machine. Don’t forget to set your boot sequence from BIOS.
On the first screen
Select language. Clonezilla support many languages. Select your language from the list and press Enter.
Select keymap. If you don’t know which one to select, leave it as is. Or select Don’t touch keymap.
Select Start Clonezilla
Select the cloning/backup mode. There are several modes you can choose from. For example, you can select Device-Image to create image from your hard disk. Or you can also use device-Device when you want to clone your existing disk to another. In this case, both disk must be online.
On this example, I choose Device-Image mode. Next, we can select where to save the image. There are several storage we can use to store the image file. You can store your image backup file on local disk, external disk, Samba server, ssh server, s3 server, webdav server and nfs server.
Local Disk
If you want to save your image file to local disk, make sure you have another disks connected to your computer. This is the easiest way to save the image file.
WebDAV
Clonezilla support WebDAV. In this example, I am going to show you how to save Clonezilla backup Image on Box.com cloud storage. I was amazed to know that we can save the backup image directly to Box.com. If you want to save the backup image to Box.com, on the following screen wizard, select WebDAV
Amazon S3 Server
Select S3_server if you are planning to save the image to your Amazon S3 storage. It is a great feature on Clonezilla to save the backup image in the cloud storage such as Amazon S3.
SSH Server
You can save the backup image to remote server via SSH. To do so, select ssh_server from the list and then enter the remote SSH server credentials.
Samba Server
Samba server is another great place to store our image. If your network has a samba server running, you can save the image to the samba shared folder.
On this example, we use ssh server to store our image backup. You are free to use another storage. Next, we need to enter the IP address of the remote server where we want to save the backup. We are going to mount the remote file system.
Enter the ssh port. The default is 22
Next, enter the user name for the remote server. Please note that the user must have write permission to the next mount folder.
Now specify the directory of the remote server where we want to save our backup image. For example, we want to put the backup inside /mnt/ directory
Next you will need to enter the password
Once you are connected to the remote server, we can continue to the next step as follow. Select beginner if you are new to Clonezilla. We do recommend this mode for easiest way.
Press Enter to continue. Now we need to select what to backup
Select savedisk if you want to backup the entire disk as an image. Choose saveparts if you want to save partitions as image. Next type the name of the backup image.
Now select which partitions or disks to backup
Press Enter to continue. On the next step we can set some additional parameters such as checking file system etc.
Set the encryption if you want to
Confirm the backup by typing y and then press enter.
Now the backup process will started.
Final Thought
Clonezilla is a great disk image and disk cloning solution. It comes with critical features to create a disaster recovery backup. It supports multi computer backup at once that can save us time. The new feature enable us to put the backup in the cloud is a revolutionary approach.
If you are interested to Clonezilla, please visit their website or start download the ISO with the link below.
