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!
I have never gotten Clonezilla to work. I don’t want to call it obsolete, but… it certainly isn’t intuitive, and in 2024 I expect even open source software as widely known as Clonezilla to have a straightforward interface.
For simple data backups, I use Kopia.
EDIT: Apparently there’s a GUI for Clonezilla called Rescuezilla. I’ll have to give it a try sometime.
Somewhat curious how CZ has never worked for you. I’ve used it for years and any failures it has had were fixed with tweaking some of the options. I love the tool myself, but I have also never heard of Rescuezilla so thanks for that. I think I’ll give that a go next time.
It’s been a while since I tried it, so I don’t recall exactly what didn’t work the last time. I think it may have been driver related.
I’m definitely going to give it another go one of these days.
It’s definitely a beast at the best of times, but the scriptability is great.
Just a few weeks ago I used it to deploy a custom Win10 image to several hundred computers in a very heterogenous environment in lite-server mode (basically PXE with extra steps). It took three of us sysadmins several days to figure out why it wasn’t working, several more to write a script that could handle every scenario. Some computers had SATA SSDs, some NVMe, some both, some SSD+HDD, the block device names (sda, sdb…) were never consistent, and some reported its HDDs to sysfs as SSDs. I ended up dissecting the ISO and came up with a solution that only required a single Enter key to start and did everything else automatically.