[clug] Clonezilla - anyone had experience with it?

[rodney peters]

On 6/4/19 8:11 PM, Eyal Lebedinsky via linux wrote:
> On 4/6/19 6:52 pm, steve jenkin via linux wrote:
>> I recently got to use Clonezilla and wondered how others found it.
>
> I use it often for many years, both for DR backups and full system 
> xfer. Also use it as a rescue boot.
>
I use it occasionally, mainly for non-FOSS.  It does have a few quirks 
and the doco is a little outdated.
>> It comes as either a Ubuntu or Debian bootable image, running off a USB.
>>
>> Had some problems with booting on an old machine.
>> It worked one day, but when I came back, the UEFI boot failed.
>> An MBR boot version worked fine - but a lot of farnarkling finding a 
>> test rig and confirming it would work.
>
> Never failed to boot, though I mostly boot from PXE, using a USB image 
> when this is not available
> (e.g. imaging the tftp server itself).
>
> Naturally, booting the iso should the most straight forward method.
>
UEFI and old machine - that does not compute.

The latest version, 2.6.1 unifies UEFI & BIOS boot - suggest you upgrade 
to that

>> On The Big Day, cloning an internal SATA disk to an external HDD in a 
>> USB-3 dock, it didn’t quite go smoothly.
>>
>> First attempt a week ago had stalled & was killed the next day…  The 
>> target 1TB disk was 200k too small as well :(
>> This time round the first copy stalled as well.
>
> Never had a stall, could there be a disk error?
>
backing up to a smaller disk requires partition by partition backup - 
not full disk backup - and also requires "expert" mode to set the 
relevant switches, in particular to ignore target size.
>> Second attempt got up and running at 9.5GB/min and stayed there, 
>> finished 1TB in under an hour.
>>
>> it eventually worked ‘like it said on the tin’. Happy with that.
>>
>> I’m left with many questions:
>>
>>     - is this “copy stalls on a block, won’t proceed” a common thing? 
>> [uses partclone]
>>
>> Â Â Â Â - being a novice with it, I tried device-device copy 1s time and 
>> failed because 1TB disks are only same-same.
>> Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  - The ext2 source only had 650GB used. Any way to use another 
>> option to copy and resize down?
>>
>
> When the source is larger than the target I resize (shrink) the source 
> to fit, always worked.
>
+1
>>     - Stupidly didn’t copy the MBR boot loader (grub I presume) the 
>> second time.
>> Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  - two reboots and two runs of grub-install & it finally worked.
>>         - does the MBR copy “Just Work” - I’d had problems with the 
>> first stalled & aborted copy.
>>
>> What I’d really like to be able to do is take disk images of a set of 
>> 4-5 older Windows systems used for testing.
>> Drives are ~150GB, so a modern ~$100 HDD would fit them all.
>
> I do this, and also tested the restore which  worked fine. Except...
> Â Â Â Â windows/7 uses a partitioning method that clonezilla cannot 
> restore to (though the backup works).
> Â Â Â Â In this case the disk needs to be partitioned in advance, and the 
> partition images need to be renamed too.
> Â Â Â Â Just don't do W/7.
>
The default settings are oriented to Windows and should copy the MBR.  
Restoring it has worked for me, but I have not tried later than XP.

If the original MBR was GRUB, then of course GRUB standalone would need 
to be installed somewhere on the restored disk.  With XP,  simply dd-ing 
the original MBR to the clone works - might not with later Windows.

>> Is this straight forward?
>> Are there gotchas I need to be aware of, especially in rebuilding 
>> drives from images?
>
Your plan to backup as images is relatively safe.  Direct disk-to-disk 
clone is unwise with Windows, in case the PC unexpectedly reboots, in 
which case the original Windows can be rendered inoperable.
> If you took a full image then a full restore should work.
>
> Whatever you decide, verify that an image restore works to a fresh disk.
>
>> regards
>> steve
>>
>> -- 
>> Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
>> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
>> PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
>>
>> mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
>