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.
|