OT: Clonezilla-live works

[Vitorio Okio]

"Les Mikesell" <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:483AE04F.1050207 at gmail.com...
> Chris Rees wrote:
>>
>>>    I got the safe version of clonezilla version 1.0.10-8 and it 
>>> works
>>> just fine. Easy to put on a CD and it comes up looking like 
>>> Ubuntu. But
>>> it has special things it can do. For example if you want to make 
>>> an
>>> EXACT copy of your present Ubuntu or Windows or MAC on another 
>>> hard
>>> drive it will do it. It makes it's own partition and uses your 
>>> current
>>> file system. A lot like the dd command.
>>
>> Or, you could do it the proper way using dump/restore. Seriously,
>> that's far safer than using dd / complicated coning software.
>
> You should try clonezilla before commenting on its complexity. The 
> only
> advantage of dump/restore is that it can move to a smaller 
> partition,
> but you have to do your own partition/filesystem setup and make the 
> disk
> bootable.
>
>> Or is that too UNIX-like for people? I've spent some time working 
>> with
>> FreeBSD; the simple approach is always recommended here :P
>
> Clonezilla is just a menu-driven scripted wrapper around standard 
> unix
> tools but it uses partition copies that know enough to only copy the
> used portions when possible (ntfs and most linux filesystems) so it 
> is
> faster than dd, and it can connect to storage for the images over 
> the
> network via nfs, samba, or ssh with menu choices as well.
>

Well, I use it for cloning local hard drives.   It works fine but in 
simple scenarios only.  Here a coule of examples where I found it 
useless.

1. I cloned two hard drives hda1 - master and hdb1 - slave but 
bootable with Windows on it.  The setup was made the way I could at 
any time remove hda1 with Ubuntu completely if needed, then set hdb1 
as master and boot into Windows.

All at a sudden :-) my hda1 drive failed.  I set hdb1 as master worked 
with it and after a while needed to restore the image of it made by 
Clonezilla...  No luck.  Clonezilla remembers that the drive was hdb1 
and now it become hda1.  I tried to edit image configuration files 
manually but ended up messing it up. :-(  May be my fault.

Luckily all was an experiment only. :-)

2. Another scenario where Clonezilla did not do the job, was restoring 
a partition.  Clonezilla offers as an option partitions cloning.  So I 
cloned one.  Then I needed to change my partitions order and sizing on 
hdd.  After that I wanted to restore a cloned partition to a new one 
(of the bigger size).  It did not do the job just because the 
partition number on hdd changed.

But for simple scenarios - restore in as it was environment - 
Clonezilla is quite good.  It's fast, reliable and quite simple to 
use.