Cloning using Ubuntu "Disks" vs "Clonezilla"
 

C2D-Q8400 - Ubu v14.04 - 8GBRAM

I've been using Clonezilla to make cloned backups of my setup w/ V-BOX VMs, but I just noticed the GUI drive mgmt utility "Disks" on Ubuntu. I've never seen this util mentioned in discussions on cloning, maintenance etc. It offers "Create a Disk Image" from the gear menu. Is this a kind of GUI front end on GParted or Rsync? Would this work by booting from the Ubuntu live CD and running it from there? Any opinion on its reliability vs Clonezilla? I am not a cmd line adept.

I assume you mean a host computer that happens to be running some VM's.

This?? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Disks

Clonezilla trys to use a file by file method to move data (using partimage and other tools.) That isn't bad actually. If it can't read the filesystem then it tries dd command and that may take a while.

I think what you may be thinking about is gparted where one can copy off partitions??

There isn't one magic answer for cloning. You have to use the method that suits you best. You may try a number of free ways or consider some commercial product like Acronis or other.

I clone whole drives for emergency "instant recovery", and using the "beginners" option in clonezilla, it is very easy to keep two or three drives backed up in rotation, as well as separate mirrored data backups. I'll use an old spare drive and play around with "Disks". See if it is easier to use or can clone to a smaller drive. Having several drives around of different sizes means you can't always clone to an exactly equal or larger drive and having to reduce the partition size of the larger drive is an annoyance. In my experience only Acronis has the capability to clone from larger to a smaller drive or partition. Every drive clone utility I have every used required booting from a live CD/DVD (Ghost, Acronis, Clonzilla, MiniTool, others) has require a live media of its own OS in order to modify storage devices on the host machine. In the old MFM 5.25" days drives were very expensive so we made very scary tape backups. Then with the first plug-in 3.5" IDEs I could copy whole drives or use crude mirroring or early multi-controller ISA boards. I suppose Ubuntu "Disks" must be run from a bootable USB or DVD version of Ubuntu for cloning. I'd like to find an open source utility with the capability to put an image on any adequate size target partition like Acronis, and align SSD partitions like MiniTool. I'll experiment with "Disks" and see what it can do.

My first computer was at the county college. We only had 25 minutes a month for the computer class to dial up, run the teletype tape, see result and log out. It was a lot of dialing up and retyping the tape.


If you are ever working on the OS drive you will have to boot to some other root. Generally the easy way is to boot to a live media. Disaster will result in trying to clone a drive that is mounted for most users.

There is a product that can do live state backups in linux but I've never tried it.

Any backup is better than no backup. If you only backup a /home folder or /data folder or just a partition then you are much better off than none at all.