Clone Windows and Linux Drives and Partitions with Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a very popular disk cloning and backup solution. Clonezilla provides a lot of different types of cloning capabilities. We can clone our source into SSH, FTP, SMB, WebDAV, or local file systems. In this tutorial, we will look at how to download Clonezilla and clone given partition to the remote file system.

Clonezilla Feature

As a popular and useful paritition and disk imaging/clonging solution it provides different and beneficial features like below.

Clonezilla supports a wide range of file systems from different platforms and operating systems like xt2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs and nilfs2 of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, (5) Minix of Minix, and (6) VMFS3 and VMFS5 of VMWare ESX. This means it can be used with operating systems and platforms like GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Minix, VMWare ESX and Chrome OS/Chromium OS, no matter it’s 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS without any problem.
Grub1 and Grub2 bootloader can be reinstalled easily.
Popular partitioning schemes like MBR, GTP are supported and BIOS or UEFI systems can be booted.
A single image can be restored into multiple systems easily at the same time in a parallel way.
Unattended mode is supported where previously provided and configured boot/clone/image options can be used automatically.
Multicast and Bittorrent are supported for massive deployment which will increase performance and decrease bandwidth usage and installation time.
Image files can be stored, exported, and read in/from the local disk, ssh server, sftp, SCP, NTFS, WebDAV, portable hard drive, etc.
Image files can be secured with the AES-256 encryption which can be securely transferred or stored.

Clonezilla Limitations

Even Clonezilla is a great solution there are some disadvantages or limitations about it. But these disadvantages or limitations are generally no problem for most of the users.

While cloning from the source to the destination storage the destination should be equal or larger than the source image which is very normal.
Differential/incremental backup is not supported which can be useful to take multiple clones for a single source and only changes are stored which can make multiple versions available.
Online imaging/cloning is not supported which means the partition to be imaged or cloned should be unmounted and not used by others.

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Download

Clonezilla can be downloaded in various format but the most popular format is 64 bit stable ISO image. We will download ISO image from the following link.

https://osdn.net/projects/clonezilla/downloads/67925/clonezilla-live-2.5.2-17-amd64.iso/

Burn to CD or Flash Storage (USB)

There are different tools to Burn into the CD. In order to burn into the CD, there are different tools for different operating systems. For the Windows CD Tool, Nero can be used. For Linux Brasero or Command Linux can be used.

To create bootable USB Flash disk please take to the following tutorials.

How To Create Bootable USB/Flash Drive with Rufus For Any OS Like Ubuntu, Windows?

Boot From CD or USB

In order to start Clonezilla, we should prepare the system we want to backup to boot from USB or CDROM according to our situation.

Start Clonezilla

We can see in the following screen Clonezilla is starting. There is following options where we can select.

Clonezilla Live is the mod we will use in this tutorial which will start Clonezilla Live mode which will not save any data into systems.
Other modes of Clonezilla live is the mode a list of other detailed live modes will be listed.
Local operating system in harddrive will open from installed operating system.
Memtest & FreeDOS will start the memory test of the current system or PC.
Network boot via iPXE will start from over network with PXE protocol.

Start Clonezilla — Start/Boot Clonezilla

Choose Language

We will select the interface language we want to use during clone and backup operations. In this case, we select English and related localization settings.

We can see that also following languages and locations settings are provided too.

Catalan
German
Hungarian
Spanish
French
Italian
Japanese
Brazilian Portuguese
Russian
Slovak
Turkish
Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)

Configure Keymap

We may select different keymap provided by the current language. In this situation, we proceed with the language provided keymap which is English . If you use different keymap than English be sure that you have selected it.

Start Mode Of Clonezilla

Clonezilla provides two work interaction mode which will provide us different interfaces to use it.

Start Clonezilla will start a menu-driven interface that can be called a GUI mode. Most of the operations are executed via menus.
Enter_shell will enter to the Clonezilla operating system shell. This is designed for advanced users where commands are provided for operations and configuration.

Choose Copy Mode

Clonezilla provides different copy modes those are like below.

device-image will copy devices and partitions to the image file.
device-device will copy devices to devices where it is like sync and creating the same device or partition.
remote-source will copy remote remotely located image files into the specified partition of the device.

Set Destination

Clonezilla can use different destination units according to copy mode.

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local_dev can be used to set local storage devices like hard drive, USB drive, external hard disk etc.

ssh_server is used to select SSH server for storage of the image.

samba_server is used to select samba or SMB or a Windows network share to be used storage of the image.

nfs_server is used to select network file system or NFS storage for images which is popularly used with Linux and Unix systems.

Webdav_server is used to select WebDAV as a storage server for images.

s3_server is used to select Amazon S3 storage service for image storage which is a cloud service and requires internet connection.

swift_server is used to store images in an OpenStack switch storage service.

enter_shell will change mode into the command line or shell.

skip will select the current system memory as storage where it will not persistent and lost after system restart. Also the size can not be enough to store imge.

Network Configuration

We need to make network configuration if we will use network based source or destinations. We need to set IP address. We have following options.

dhcp will get the IP address automatically from the DHCP server.
static configuration is used to set IP and network addresses manually and statically.
pppoe is used to configure PPPoE network configuration.
enter_shell can be used to set IP address in Linux bash shell

Mount Remote File System

As we have selected SSH or SSHFS as a remote file system we should set some parameters. We will provide the following parameters.

The IP address of the remote server
Ssh port number
SSHFS file system mount point
SSH connection username
SSH connection password

Here we will provide the password for the user root.

Choose Wizard Mode

We have two options to set backup options.

Beginner option is used to configure basic settings and will ask fewer questions and configuration parameters.
Expert option is designed to configure every and detailed option one by one for more optimization.

Save Type

Clonezilla can save the whole disk or selected partitions. We select to save or backup selected partitions. savedisk will save the selected disk as a whole into a single image file. This can be also called as raw mode.

Set Backup Name

We need to set the backup name. Clonezilla will provide the name automatically according to the current date and time.

Select Partitions

We will select the source partitions we want to clone. In this case we select the partition named vda1 which is about 50GB in size with the ext4 file system.

Select Disk Integrity Check

We can check integrity of the source before backup operation. But checking disk integrity operation takes some time so we will skip to check disk integrity in this case. Also -fsck option can be selected in order to check the source disk file system integrity before starting imaging operation. -fsck-y option can be used for source disk file system integrity check and repair automatically if there is an error about the file system.

Or we can check saved image file integrity with the following screen.Yes will also check the created image integrity.

Select Encryption

We can also encrypt saved image if we need more security. But in this case, we will do not encrypt images. Option -senc is used to skip encryption and -enc is used to encrypt the created disk image.

Select Action Take After Copy

We can select the action that will take after the backup operation is completed. - choose will ask us when the operation is complete. -p reboot will automatically reboot the system when the operation is completed. -p poweroff will shut down the system when the operation is complete.

Start Clone Operation

These screens provides the start of the backup or clone operation.

and then

Cloning or Backup Operation

The following screen will provide detailed information about the backup process. We will be provided information like

Elapsed Time
Remaining Time
Current Operation