How to Clone an Encrypted Disk Image with Clonezilla

onebuck · 08-31-2017, 11:11 AM

Hi,

Helpful article for those that may wish to clone an image.

How to Clone an Encrypted Disk Image with Clonezilla;

Quote:

Clonezilla is an Open Source disk/partition imaging tool based mainly on partclone utility. The Clonezilla image is a tool that can be very useful in case of full system disk backups or in restoring damaged partitions. Clonezilla runs on top a driven command line wizard and can clone the data blocks of a hard drive directly from one disk to other disk or create images for disks/partitions to a locally attached hard disk or a mounted network resource via SMB, NFS or SSH protocols. All cloned images can be encrypted and centralized on an external drive (USB device, HDD) or in a network location specifically designed for this purpose, such as a Network Attached Storage. Using this method you can easily save your day in case of a critical physical drive failure of a server or a desktop. You just plug-in the brand new hard disk, boot into Clonezilla and start restoring the image from the saved location.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how to image or clone the hard drive of a CentOS 7 server used as a DHCP and DNS server in production (DNS and DHCP data don’t change that often on the server). The cloned image will also be encrypted on-fly during the cloning process. A passphrase will be used to encrypt and decrypt the image. In case of losing or forgetting the passphrase, the imaged data will be forever lost.

Good article with loads of helpful information.

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

jsbjsb001 · 08-31-2017, 11:46 AM

I use Clonezilla myself and also have an encrypted 'home' partition. I find it to be very good cloning software and has saved me quite a few times. I found it to be the most reliable solution for cloning disks (software that I've used myself, that is).

Thanks for your thread, love your work!!

onebuck · 08-31-2017, 02:36 PM

Hi,

Your Welcome!

Just trying to provide useful information for fellow LQ members.

Have fun & enjoy!

rknichols · 08-31-2017, 09:42 PM

A couple of comments on that article -

Since clonezilla can't see the filesystem structure inside that encrypted disk, it can't do its magic of copying only used space and ignoring the free space. The resulting action is the same as what you would get by just using dd.
The point of encrypting the copy of an already encrypted filesystem escapes me. Perhaps, despite the article's title, the whole disk was not actually encrypted.