Clonezilla
32- & 64-bit
No, it’s not a mistake. Clonezilla is actually on the DVD, it just doesn’t appear on the boot menu because we couldn’t figure out how to make it boot. But that’s okay, because it’ll take you no time at all to write the ISO file (which you’ll find in the Clonezilla/ folder on the disc) to a USB stick using either Balena Etcher (https://etcher.io) or any of the other methods listed on our DVD support pages. Oh, and on the subject of things that aren’t mistakes, SystemRescue and Rescuezilla are on the disc too – you can read about them in our Rescue and Recover feature back on page 56.
And we can fill this page extolling the virtues of Clonezilla. Don’t worry, it’s not a monster with a penchant for tearing down power lines, rather it’s an incredibly useful tool for cloning, backing up and restoring partitions.
If you’ve ever tried to move a Windows or macOS install from one drive to another, you’ll know it’s very easy to get it wrong. Proprietary OSes and their bootloaders have all kinds of expectations about where to find their partitions and don’t take to third-party tools rejiggling things. Even moving partitions on pure-Linux machines can be non-trivial, but at least there it’s often straightforward to repair, at least if you comfortable with the likes of our remedial Grub instructions on the previous pages.
It’s a problem that should be solved with UEFI, but somewhat ironically ends up being compounded by it. For example, if you’re not keeping the old drive you’ll need to prepare a new EFI partition on the new one, and then teach it about the new disk layout. Hardware manufacturers’ poor implementations of UEFI can lead to their own problems, sometimes superficial like rearranging your boot menu, and sometimes serious like none of the boot menu entries working. Anyway, don’t worry. Whatever your partition-related quest, Clonezilla can in all likelihood help with it.
You’ll find case-by-case usage instructions at https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php. But to just have a nosey at the program, choose Clonezilla live from the boot menu (or use the copy to ram option if you have more than about 1GB of memory), select your language and keyboard and choose Start Clonezilla. Despite its humble interface it can connect to Amazon S3 storage, or even use BitTorrent to serve images. And if you are planning massive-scale cloning operations, Clonezilla can even run in a server mode and orchestrate the whole thing. Simply glorious!