Linux

Generally I just don't take clones of disk partitions anymore. They tend to take up too much disk space to keep more than one or two backups and typically require the disk to be unmounted which means it's a mostly manual process. That all but guarantees that any backup I take will be out of date when I need it most.

Instead I've found it better to take regular automated file level backups and automate the way I configure my environment so that I can quickly restore and rebuild if something goes wrong.

If I just want to be able to quickly revert a drive to a previous state or have easy point-in-time restore I manage the disk with ZFS. ZFS has a snapshotting feature which is great for this sort of thing and you can even restore snapshots to another zfs pool the same way you might restore a partition to another disk but without all the hassle of resizing things.

Second for Rescuezilla, it's a Clonezilla front end with sane defaults you'd probably pick anyways.

I use clonezilla at work for imaging and deploying laptops. It works like a charm. Great piece of software. It's not normal backup software though.

It's difficult to use with some odd defaults as I remember, and you have to boot into it which is annoying.

Rescuezilla seems like a good open source option, but you do still have to boot into it.

My go-to is the free Veeam Endpoint, as it just installs on the system and does full system images without needing to reboot. I'm not sure if there is a good easy to use open source equivalent to it, so far I have not found one.

I still use Clonezilla to back up devices before performing reinstalls/major updates (when Timeshift isn't practical). No issues so far backing up and restoring both Windows and Linux partitions/drives.

Idk... but im sure you can use pretty much any live distro with partclone

I never really had a need for the features provided by Clonezilla. I've always just used dd since it's available on any Linux live disk. Unless I'm making an image for data recovery, I zero the free space and pipe the dd output through gzip to avoid wasting space.

The main thing about Clonezilla is that you can always rely on it working, no matter the system. The bad thing is that proprietary solutions have a lot more creature comforts.

Used it for cloning some laptops recently without much issue. Cloned one laptop's primary partition onto an SD card and then imaged the others no problem. Laptops were 256GBs capacity (but only like 30-60 GBs used) and the SD card was 64 GBs. Seemed pretty simple to me.

There's a lot of options for those who want to do things like deploy over a network, but I haven't messed with them seriously (I didn't have the ethernet cables to do it - wasted a bit of time trying before realizing they weren't connect to a network; maybe there's a way to connect via wifi, but I didn't see it)

Clonezilla has its place, but not as a main backup and restoration tool. I personally don't see it as a backup tool, especially that it operates at partition level for such. What you want is you base install system and file level backups for your data (/home/) etc. For the file level backups, use something like restic. Backup what you need to go from a fresh install to a system with your data back on it. Packages can be reinstalled.

Restic is my primary backup for all my devices. If I need something more than fresh iso -> my data system, I use packer.

I use kopia, it's more automated and deduplicates snapshot.

Yes, works great! Used it to clone some windows users stuff, he thought having a dozen partitions makes sense, still no problem at all. Copied everything from HDD to bigger SSD, just worked.

You download the ISO, flash it to a usb stick (we used rufus, but dd, impression (udisks2 frontent in gtk&rust) or balena etcher should also work). The TUI is usable, has some options but the defaults seem good.

I've used Clonezilla recently to clone my main 1tb drive aswell as a 4tb backup drive to an external HDD and both times worked fine.

It is painfully slow however but I'm not sure I could do anything about that outside of buying faster drives.

Clonezilla or dd. if you are on GNOME you can use gnome disks and it has a create diak image, restore disk image option, if you want an img file

Also interested in this. Currently in need of an imaging solution that's less clunky to use than Clonezilla.

I'd recommend just scripting with rsync commands and run with cron or whatever scheduling automation. Backup locally to an external drive or orchestrate with cloud provider cli tools for something like S3.

There are some tools that probably assist with this, but it's just very few moving parts to roll your own. Clonezilla seems overkill and harder to automate, but I will admit I'm not an expert with it.

Rescuezilla is much better

The big advantage of Clonezilla or using dd is you make a perfect 1:1 copy of the disk so you're pretty confident it will restore perfectly, but you need a disk of at least the same size and so on. Also perfect if you're trying to do file recovery and so on, because even corrupted or entirely unreachable data is still technically on the disk.

That's very inefficient when you have say, 5GB used of a 1TB disk, although compression will help a bit. But that's where more specialized tools comes in: what if we could only backup the actual data, and end up with a 5GB backup before compression.

That's useful and nice, but can't possibly deal with corrupted or deleted files since it'll just skip over them. The backup is only as good as all the filesystem features the archiver can encode. On Linux, tar has us pretty well covered as long as you only need relatively standard features like owners, groups. If you zip your root Linux partition you'll end up with broken ownership and permissions, because it doesn't encode ACLs and xattrs and hardlinks and whatever else. On NTFS, since it's proprietary, undocumented and a fairly complex filesystem, it's much riskier. If you backup your game library, you're probably fine, but if you want Windows to boot after a restore, you need a much more complete backup and if you don't want to take risks, whole partition backups are much safer. ntfsclone exists but I just don't trust it like I would trust tar to backup my ext4 partitions correctly.

So it's all a tradeoff. Do you want efficiency, or do you want reliability? How much of the information can you lose? Like, if you backup your C: drive on Windows but only care about your files and documents but not the Windows install itself, then it makes sense to just archive the files rather than a block copy.

So, what do you expect from your backups? The answer to that question also answers this thread.

The fact that Linux lacks a decent system-level backup tool with a GUI is kind of a mind boggler for me. The best one I've found which gets close to this is timeshift. File-level backups can't restore your whole system state and users shouldn't be expected to remember or manually export their package lists and god knows what else. I have subsisted on file-only backups but it's really not great as a solution. Disks fail, and when they do, you inevitably have to reinstall the entire OS. It's a mess. RAID1 could theoretically prevent this, but no distro makes it easy to boot from a RAID1 setup.

Backing up the entire filesystem is not a technically complex thing, there are plenty of command-line tools to do this and some filesystems even support this concept via snapshots etc. But this has yet to be put into a useful practice for end users.

Rescuezilla is nice. I believe it just puts a more user friendly GUI on clonezilla

Clonezilla is the tool I use after all else has failed. I agree that it is difficult to use, but it can do things others can't. I saved quite a few of my drives with this thing. So while I try to avoid having to use it, it still belongs in my toolkit.

Others have mentioned rsync and I'd like to suggest on top of rdiff-backup but it's indeed for files, not partitions or disks. That being said IMHO if you are not managing data-centers and thus swapping entire physical disks by the bucket, you probably don't want to actually care for disks themselves.

If you genuinely have to frequently change not just data but entire systems, maybe looking at nix or cloud-init could help.

Just use disk destroyer.