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29 SIVAN 5780 How to save a Clonezilla full disk image to a server/NAS over SSH Topics: CLIs

Clonezilla is one of my favorite backup tools (and that has nothing to do with the fact that it is free!).

It’s a �ny bootable GNU/Linux u�lity that is designed to be wri�en to a live USB. And once running on the system, it can replicate the system disks onto both local and remote targets (for the la�er think AWS S3

1 of 11 06/07/2020, 20:54 How to save a Clonezilla full disk image to a server/NA... https://www.danielrosehill.co.il/myblog/how-to-save-a...

buckets — it can directly write to them!).

Unlike most system backup programs, which work by crea�ng compara�vely light differen�al/incremental to crea�ve plen�ful restore points to roll back the system to, Clonezilla is the kind of tool that you want to have on hand when things go really wrong or when you need to try restore your old opera�ng system on completely new hardware. The only catch is that you need to create backups for those eventuali�es before you get to that point. And if you want the restores to be as useful to you as possible, you’ll also want to complete the process rela�vely frequently (just not quite as frequently as your incrementals.)

So what’s so special about it, then?

For one, it’s a disk imaging tool which is designed to achieve bare metal backups. That means that it creates an exact replicas of your computer’s storage on another. It captures the whole system so takes ‘full’ backups. But instead of choosing what files and directories you want to include in a backup set, Clonezilla operates at the hardware level: you can back up specific par��ons or en�re drives (it supports ext4 as well as FAT32 and NFTS and many more … so is OS-agnos�c).

Unlike many backup programs, Clonezilla also runs from a cold system: you’ll boot into it with nothing else running and won’t be able to use your desktop/laptop while it’s execu�ng the backup job.

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Backing up a Linux host to a Synology NAS with rsync

Because disk imaging tools are designed to back up everything on a system, as we have seen, they aren’t really suitable for crea�ng those frequent restore points that I just men�oned. It would be a needlessly inefficient use of disk space given that much lighter backup methodologies have been developed.

But as a last resort / Swiss Army Knife for when things go wrong, disk imaging pla�orms (and Acronis True Image is among the best known commercial alterna�ves) are s�ll widely used and in a class of their own.

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Ubuntu Desktop backup to Synology NAS - with Cloudberry

And incidentally it’s not all bad news when comparing image replica�on to lighter backup approaches.

The fact that it is a full disk backup actually gives it one advantage over lighter differen�al and incremental backups. Incremental backups form a chain since the first backup and — in many backup systems — a restore is dependent upon all those incremental slices being good (uncorrupted) data, which is not always the case. With a full disk backup — you just restore from one archive and that data chunk is not dependent on any other one.

For the reasons outlined above, many com