Back Up/Restore Hard Drives And Partitions With CloneZilla Live

Back Up/Restore Hard Drives And Partitions With CloneZilla Live

Version 1.0
Author: Falko Timme

This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with CloneZilla Live. CloneZilla Live is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost. The created images are compressed and can be transferred to a Samba-, SSH-, or NFS server or to a local hard drive or USB drive.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

 

1 Get CloneZilla Live

First we must download the CloneZilla Live iso image from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=115473 and burn it to a CD. At the time of this writing the current version is 1.2.1.

 

2 Creating A Hard Drive Image

Next we insert the CloneZilla Live CD into the CD drive of the system we want to back up (for example, your Ubuntu desktop) and make the system boot from the CloneZilla Live CD (you might have to change the order of the boot devices in the BIOS so that the computer tries to boot from the CD before the hard drive). CloneZilla Live comes up with this screen. Hit ENTER to boot:

Select your language:

Select your keyboard layout:

Next select Start Clonezilla:

I want to create an image of my hard drive, therefore I select device-image disk/partition to/from image:

Now you can select where you want to store the hard drive image. You can store it on a local device (hard drive, USB drive), on an SSH server, on a Samba server, or on an NFS server. I have a Samba server in my network that I want to use, therefore I select samba_server (make sure that the server or device that you select has enough free space):

If you select SSH, Samba, or NFS, the CloneZilla system needs a network connection. If you are in a local network with a DHCP server, you can select dhcp (but you can as well assign a static IP address to the system):

Fill in the IP address or hostname (the hostname must exist in DNS, otherwise the CloneZilla system cannot resolve it) of your Samba server:

You can leave the Samba domain empty if no domain is set in the Samba server: