How to clone hard drives with Clonezilla

“Clonezilla supports a whole battalion of filesystems and then
some. It can work its magic on partitions formatted as ext2, ext3,
ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, FAT, NTFS, and HFS+, so you can let it rip on
Linux, Windows, and Intel-based Macs. If Clonezilla encounters a
partition type it doesn’t understand, say Solaris’s ZFS, it’ll fire
up the venerable dd and still get the job done. It’ll constantly
amaze you, so if you’re looking for a bullet-proof way to backup
your disks, read on…

“Big on saving

“Clonezilla not only saves your data, but also saves you a lot
of time when doing so, by concentrating its efforts on stuff that
matters – or segments of the disk that contain the data, and
ignoring the blank space. But, unlike a simple data backup app,
Clonezilla remembers the size of the partitions that you’re asking
it to clone.

“So, if you have a partially used 10GB NTFS partition, you can
squeeze it in a 4GB pen drive, and yet when restoring it on another
disk, ask Clonezilla to create the original 10GB partition. Oh, and
it can compress this data using gzip, bzip2, or lzo compression
algorithms. In theory it should take a lot of time to compress the
data, but on the chic dual-cores juiced with a couple of GB of RAM,
you’d hardly have time to make coffee. I cloned an 80GB disk with
one NTFS, one FAT, three ext3, and a Solaris ZFS partition on to a
40GB USB disk in under 20 mins. And it took less than half that
time to restore.”

Complete
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