How to save a Clonezilla full disk image to a server/NA... https://www.danielrosehill.co.il/myblog/how-to-save-a... Daniel Rosehill Blog Linux, writing, and more ALL GENERAL FREELANCING HOW TO LINUX BACKUP TECH MISC REVIEWS VIDEO ABOUT I’M HERE TOO LINKS MY WRITING 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 backups 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. 2 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... 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. 3 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... 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 companies use a combina�on of incremental backups for day-to-day data protec�on and less frequent full disk imaging In the pre-Synology era, I kept a separate backup SSD on my computer just for holding my Clonezilla images. Alongside Timeshi� (rsync-based, incremental) these two backups were my onsite backup sources. When my DS920+ arrived from Synology last week I made it my priority to 4 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... start backing up onto the NAS rather than internal drives. And here’s how I managed to get Clonezilla backups onto the NAS. How To Take a Clonezilla Backup over the LAN (Images from the Clonezilla website.) 1. Select the backup methodology and enable the right �le services A�er boo�ng into Clonezilla, when you reach the screen asking you where to mount the Clonezilla image directory you want to select ‘SSH server.’ Note: 5 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... You can also create the backup to the Synology NAS over Samba or NFS. However all of these op�ons — including SSH — need to first be enabled on the device via DSM. In order to do that, navigate to ‘File Services’ in the Control Panel. Then you will need to enable the service you wish to use for backing up (or saving) to the device over the Local Area Network (LAN): 6 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... 2. Create a shared folder for the backup Next, I recommend crea�ng a shared folder on the network simply called ‘Clonezilla’ 7 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... As we will see in the next step, your target needs to be a real directory on the NAS in order for Clonezilla to authen�cate with it. 3. Change mount path to the shared folder Firstly, you’ll need to provide the local IP address of the NAS / server and then provide login creden�als. Clonezilla will then need to know where to mount for saving the backup on the target. 8 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... By default this is set to /home/par�mag. The problem is that this path almost certainly doesn’t exist on your target. So you need to set it to one that does. As we just created Clonezilla we can simply change the path to: /Clonezilla. This is very important. If you do not do this — and leave the default op�on unchanged — in many cases Clonezilla will fail to complete its authen�ca�on check with the NAS and you won’t be able to run the disk cloning job. It took me about five failed a�empts to run this backup before I realized that this was the problem! 4. Approve the backup job OTHER LINKS Newsle�er Wri�ng on Other Sites 9 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... Ghostwri�ng Github Amazon Danbuntu 18.04 (LTS) Contact Me Contact Me (Anon) TOP POSTS Freelance Wri�ng Pricing: Per Word, Per Hour, or Per Project? And How Much Of Each? How to: Create a Password-Protected WordPress Staging Environment Using So�aculous And Cloudflare Access My (Unorthodox) Produc�vity Resolu�on For This Year — Be Less ‘Responsive’! 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