My dear lemmings,
I discovered Clonezilla a while ago and it still is my main tool to backup and restore the partitions I care about on my computers.
I cannot help but wonder if there are now better, more efficient alternatives or is it still a solid choice? There’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just curious about others’ practices and habits — and if there was newer tools or solutions available.
Thank you for your feedback, and keep your drives safe!
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 That all but guarantees that any backup I take will be out of date when I need it most.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.