I’m having a specific problem when using a bootable Clonezilla Live 3.1.1.27 USB with my Windows 11 PC.
The PC has a single drive (SSD) with nine partitions. Four of these are for Windows and the other five are for my data. I’d like to use one of those data partitions to store a Clonezilla image of the four OS partitions, such that I can restore the four OS partitions only to a known state – without affecting the existence or contents of the data partitions. From what I’ve read it seems that Clonezilla ought to be able to do this in ‘Beginner Mode.’
At this stage I’m still storing my images on a separate external HDD rather than using the internal one as I’d like to. But even when doing that I always have the same problem, which is that the restore process doesn’t just restore the partitions that I’ve asked it to – it also appears to erase the contents of all the other partitions too. (OK so strictly speaking the data might still be there. But it no longer appears when I use Windows to look in the data partitions. So for practical purposes it’s gone.)
I’ve tried every permutation of 'savedisk', 'saveparts', 'restoredisk', and 'restoreparts' that looks as if it might do what I want. And without exception they all appear to execute without any problems. The scrolling screen text tells me that I’m restoring the four partitions that I want to. And everything looks sweet. But when the process is finished I examine my data partitions and find that my data is gone.
Can anyone confirm whether Clonezilla can actually do what I’m wanting, and which exact operations (i.e. savedisk, saveparts, restoredisk, restoreparts) are supposed to do it? If anyone can throw any light on what I might be dong wrong that would be great too.'
In view of the two comments in response to my original post a few further words might be useful to anyone else considering a response.
I’ve now run the same Clonezilla ‘restoreparts’ process on another PC that’s dual-booting with Window 10 and Ubuntu 22.04LTS. That one has that ten partitions on its SSD, and the partial restore that I was attempting on the first PC works fine. So unless I’m being lucky with that second PC the claim beow that ‘Clonezilla can’t do it’ would at this stage seem to be incorrect.
Regarding the claim that nine partitions is ‘next level overkill’, Gparted shows that six of the partitions (on both machines) are the result of the basic OEM/Microsoft Windows installation. (These are EFI System, Microsoft Reserved, Windows OS, Windows Recovery, a hidden ‘image’ parttion, and a partition reserved for OEM use.) So to have nine on a dual-boot machine does not seem unreasonable. The dual-boot set-up that I obtained using the Ubuntu installation media already left me with an eight-partition system. The only extra ones that I added on that second machine were for Veracrypt, which I wanted to access from both Windows and Ubuntu. (I use ext4 for Veracrypt partitions because Windows doesn’t recognise them until Veracrypt has mounted them. Consequently it doesn’t offer to format them for me – such that an accidental click on ‘OK’ might then destroy my files).
With regard to the more general comments made about back-ups I would emphasise that the image partition that I am hoping to use on the target machine is not intended as my prime OS back-up, not for any personal files at all, and certainly not to cater for serious hardware failure. Its purpose is simply to allow me to quickly and easily restore the OS and applications to a known configuration without having to re-install Windows, update it, configure it to my liking, and then install and configure numerous applications. That could otherwise take a whole day. My main image copies are kept (and duplicated) on two physically separate external drives. However I travel a lot, and to avoid carrying extra hardware around it’s much easier if casual re-imaging is possible using files on the target machine.
With regard to back-up tools I am aware of the back-up and recovery functions available within Windows and elsewhere, and have used them (e.g. Acronis TrueImage) for over twenty years since the days of Windows 98. But as already noted Windows doesn’t recognise ext4 partitions, and tools such as Clonezilla allow me to do everything from a single USB stick.
So although my question is currently basking in a ‘-1’ it would certainly be useful to me to find out what the problem is with the first PC.