Generally I just don’t take clones of disk partitions anymore. They tend to take up too much disk space to keep more than one or two backups and typically require the disk to be unmounted which means it’s a mostly manual process. That all but guarantees that any backup I take will be out of date when I need it most.

Instead I’ve found it better to take regular automated file level backups and automate the way I configure my environment so that I can quickly restore and rebuild if something goes wrong.

If I just want to be able to quickly revert a drive to a previous state or have easy point-in-time restore I manage the disk with ZFS. ZFS has a snapshotting feature which is great for this sort of thing and you can even restore snapshots to another zfs pool the same way you might restore a partition to another disk but without all the hassle of resizing things.

I use clonezilla at work for imaging and deploying laptops. It works like a charm. Great piece of software. It’s not normal backup software though.

It’s difficult to use with some odd defaults as I remember, and you have to boot into it which is annoying.

Rescuezilla seems like a good open source option, but you do still have to boot into it.

My go-to is the free Veeam Endpoint, as it just installs on the system and does full system images without needing to reboot. I’m not sure if there is a good easy to use open source equivalent to it, so far I have not found one.

Second for Rescuezilla, it’s a Clonezilla front end with sane defaults you’d probably pick anyways.

I never really had a need for the features provided by Clonezilla. I’ve always just used dd since it’s available on any Linux live disk. Unless I’m making an image for data recovery, I zero the free space and pipe the dd output through gzip to avoid wasting space.

The main thing about Clonezilla is that you can always rely on it working, no matter the system. The bad thing is that proprietary solutions have a lot more creature comforts.

Idk… but im sure you can use pretty much any live distro with partclone

I use kopia, it’s more automated and deduplicates snapshot.

I’ve used Clonezilla recently to clone my main 1tb drive aswell as a 4tb backup drive to an external HDD and both times worked fine.

It is painfully slow however but I’m not sure I could do anything about that outside of buying faster drives.

Yes, works great! Used it to clone some windows users stuff, he thought having a dozen partitions makes sense, still no problem at all. Copied everything from HDD to bigger SSD, just worked.

You download the ISO, flash it to a usb stick (we used rufus, but dd, impression (udisks2 frontent in gtk&rust) or balena etcher should also work). The TUI is usable, has some options but the defaults seem good.

Clonezilla or dd. if you are on GNOME you can use gnome disks and it has a create diak image, restore disk image option, if you want an img file

I’d recommend just scripting with rsync commands and run with cron or whatever scheduling automation. Backup locally to an external drive or orchestrate with cloud provider cli tools for something like S3.

There are some tools that probably assist with this, but it’s just very few moving parts to roll your own. Clonezilla seems overkill and harder to automate, but I will admit I’m not an expert with it.

Rescuezilla is nice. I believe it just puts a more user friendly GUI on clonezilla

Also interested in this. Currently in need of an imaging solution that’s less clunky to use than Clonezilla.

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