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 That all but guarantees that any backup I take will be out of date when I need it most.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.

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 still use Clonezilla to back up devices before performing reinstalls/major updates (when Timeshift isn’t practical). No issues so far backing up and restoring both Windows and Linux partitions/drives.

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

Clonezilla has its place, but not as a main backup and restoration tool. I personally don’t see it as a backup tool, especially that it operates at partition level for such. What you want is you base install system and file level backups for your data (/home/) etc. For the file level backups, use something like restic. Backup what you need to go from a fresh install to a system with your data back on it. Packages can be reinstalled.

Restic is my primary backup for all my devices. If I need something more than fresh iso -> my data system, I use packer.

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

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

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.

Rescuezilla is much better

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.

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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.

Just use disk destroyer.

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.