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!

  • 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

      • 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

        • Yes, zero spacing and compress. In my case I was building a direct clone backup for when nas might fail and I can swap drive innediately, but did not want to wait hours to dd the empty drive to an image file.