How to Back Up and Clone Your Hard Drives with Clonezilla

Posted on by Yaman ŞenerLeave a comment

Clonezilla is a powerful open-source tool for creating perfect copies, or ‘clones’, of partitions and entire hard drives. Unlike file-based backup programs, Clonezilla copies the actual disk blocks, ensuring that everything from the operating system to installed programs and settings is preserved. This makes it an ideal solution for full system backups, upgrading to a new hard drive, or deploying a standard system image across multiple computers.

Table of Contents

  1. 1. How Clonezilla Works
  2. 2. Creating a Bootable Clonezilla USB Drive
  3. 3. How to Clone a Disk to an Image File
  4. 3.1 More Topics

How Clonezilla Works

Clonezilla is a small, bootable Linux distribution, meaning you run it directly from a USB flash drive or CD instead of from within your main operating system. It is highly efficient, only copying used data blocks and compressing the resulting image files in real-time to save space. A backup of an 11GB system, for example, might only take up 6GB of storage space.

Creating a Bootable Clonezilla USB Drive

  1. Download Clonezilla: Go to the official website (https://clonezilla.org) and download the latest ‘Clonezilla Live’ ISO file.
  2. Prepare a USB Drive: You’ll need a spare USB flash drive (at least 1GB). It’s best to format it with a single FAT32 partition. You can do this using a tool like GParted. In GParted, make sure to set the ‘boot’ flag on the partition.
  3. Copy the Files: Open the downloaded Clonezilla archive and extract all of its contents directly onto your newly formatted USB drive.

How to Clone a Disk to an Image File

This process creates a backup image of your entire hard drive, which you can store on an external drive.

  1. Boot into Clonezilla: Reboot your computer with the Clonezilla USB drive plugged in. You may need to press a key like F10 or F12 during startup to open the boot menu and select the USB drive.
  2. Start Clonezilla: From the main Clonezilla menu, select the default option to start Clonezilla. Proceed through the language and keyboard layout menus. When prompted, choose Start Clonezilla.
  3. Select Mode: Choose the first option, device-image, to work with disks and image files.
  4. Choose Image Repository: On the next screen, select local_dev to use a locally connected storage device (like an external USB hard drive) to save the image. Plug in your external drive, press Enter, and when you see it listed, press Ctrl+C. Select the partition on your external drive where you want to save the image.
  5. Beginner Mode: Choose Beginner mode for a simplified process.
  6. Choose Operation: Select savedisk to save the entire local disk as an image.
  7. Name the Image: Accept the default name for the image file, which is based on the current date.
  8. Select Source Disk: Carefully select the source disk you want to clone. Use the disk size to help identify the correct one.
  9. Confirm and Run: Follow the final prompts to check the source filesystem and begin the cloning process. Clonezilla will ask for confirmation multiple times as this is a critical operation. The process will then begin, showing you the progress.

To restore the image, you would follow a similar process but choose restoredisk instead of savedisk and select the target disk you wish to restore to.

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Hello! I'm a gaming enthusiast, a history buff, a cinema lover, connected to the news, and I enjoy exploring different lifestyles. I'm Yaman Şener/trioner.com, a web content creator who brings all these interests together to offer readers in-depth analyses, informative content, and inspiring perspectives. I'm here to accompany you through the vast spectrum of the digital world.

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