Reanimation

To restore an image, simply go through the whole procedure in reverse order. That is, you need to select the following menu items in the order Start_Clonezilla | device-image | local_dev and attach the medium with the image, if applicable; then, select the image, specify the directory containing the image, and opt for Beginner mode. Because you will be restoring a partition to disk, restoreparts is the correct mode to choose. Clonezilla should now show you the image or images to restore – if not, you might have chosen the wrong medium in a previous step.

Next you must decide on a partition to which Clonezilla will restore the image. Again, this will destroy any existing data on the partition; consider your decision carefully. The target partition must be exactly the same size as the original partition; if it is larger, you are just wasting space.

In some special cases, you can modify the system in the image to match its new home environment, but this requires the Expert mode with the use of the -r parameter.

Next, you need to confirm the command line shown in green and check the summary once more. After confirming the settings by pressing y, Clonezilla will prompt you once again, just to be sure. Do not interrupt the write process unless you really do want a partition that is full of junk data.

Conclusions

Clonezilla Live, which was developed at the NCHC (National Center for High Performance Computing [2]) in Taiwan, is a fast, free, and user-friendly tool for backing up complete disks. Although Clonezilla uses compression, full backups can be fairly large, and the tool does not offer incremental backups at the time of this writing. For these reasons, Clonezilla should be considered as something to supplement your daily backup routine.

Another thing Clonezilla does not offer is partitioning. Live CDs by third parties have found a solution to this failing. For example, GParted-Clonezilla includes the GParted [3] partitioning program. You will also find Clonezilla on a variety of rescue CDs, such as Parted Magic 4.2 [4], which was released in June 2009.