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!

  • loie@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 months ago

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

  • Gabu@lemmy.ml
    3·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • HouseWolf@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • const_void@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

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

  • Terces@lemmy.world
    1·
    10 months ago

    Clonezilla is the tool I use after all else has failed. I agree that it is difficult to use, but it can do things others can’t. I saved quite a few of my drives with this thing. So while I try to avoid having to use it, it still belongs in my toolkit.

  • lps@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

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

  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    11·
    10 months ago

    Others have mentioned rsync and I’d like to suggest on top of rdiff-backup but it’s indeed for files, not partitions or disks. That being said IMHO if you are not managing data-centers and thus swapping entire physical disks by the bucket, you probably don’t want to actually care for disks themselves.

    If you genuinely have to frequently change not just data but entire systems, maybe looking at nix or cloud-init could help.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    23·
    10 months ago

    The fact that Linux lacks a decent system-level backup tool with a GUI is kind of a mind boggler for me. The best one I’ve found which gets close to this is timeshift. File-level backups can’t restore your whole system state and users shouldn’t be expected to remember or manually export their package lists and god knows what else. I have subsisted on file-only backups but it’s really not great as a solution. Disks fail, and when they do, you inevitably have to reinstall the entire OS. It’s a mess. RAID1 could theoretically prevent this, but no distro makes it easy to boot from a RAID1 setup.

    Backing up the entire filesystem is not a technically complex thing, there are plenty of command-line tools to do this and some filesystems even support this concept via snapshots etc. But this has yet to be put into a useful practice for end users.