humpty promotes > Linux > Clonezilla
Linux Tips .
  Clonezilla

 Your All-In-One Backup Drive

Bit for bit Partition Backup.    - -  All In One Disk  - -
A reliable and pristine backup is important for data recovery during emergencies or mishaps.
This guides shows you how to make a bootable Clonezilla All-In-One backup drive using a UEFI boot.

The trick is to be able to save your backups as images to the same disk that you booted from
and for that we create another partition for your backup images.

Create your backup drive in 4 easy steps.

Step 1.     Create Partitions on your Backup drive.

We will use a large USB SSD drive (e.g 500GB) as your Backup drive.

Use a program e.g gparted to delete and create partitions.
Make sure you select a GPT partition table (not MBR).

Create two partitions and format them like below;

GPT
 Type
 Size
 Content
Partition 1
 FAT32
 1GB
 clonezilla UEFI Boot files
 from clonezilla-live-X.Y.Z-ab-amd64.zip
Partition 2
 exFAT
 the rest of the drive
 for saving backup images






Step 2.     Download the Clonezilla ZIP file.

Download Clonezilla      Choose the Debian-based stable version.
Select CPU architecture: amd64
Select file type: zip
Extract the zip file.
You will find there are several directories and files e.g boot, EFI, home..etc

Copy everything into the Partition 1 of the Backup drive.   (with EFI, etc  at the root) .

Step 3.     Boot the Backup drive.
When you boot a modern motherboard as UEFI, it should recognise Partition 1 as a boot option.

If your motherboard offers a UEFI menu, it should be one of the items.
If not, go into your motherboard BIOS and try to find this boot option under 'Boot' , 'Boot Option #2',
or an item inside 'Boot Override'.

( If your motherboard cannot find the clonezilla UEFI boot partition, consider installing rEFInd,
which is a boot manager that boots everything under the sun. )

Step 4.     Use Clonezilla
Once you boot clonezilla, just follow the prompts.

You can select to either save or restore an image of a partition or a disk.
When it comes to choosing a writable area to save,
choose your boot disk (usually sda);

sda      disk 465.8G ...                <-- Use this disk

and Partition 2 (usually sda2).
e.g

 sda2     465.8G|exfat| ...           <-- Use this partition to save your clonezilla images to

That's it !