I want to backup my Xubuntu using Clonezilla, but I want to exclude some folders, like pictures. Is it possible to exclude some folders from being backed up on Clonezilla?
I have 18gb of music, 20 gb of movies and 12gb of ebooks that are already backed up elsewhere, is it possible to exclude them from being backed up in clonezilla?
No, that would defeat the idea of "cloning". Cloning is intended to have you end up with an exact copy.
CLONING » The process of duplicating either an individual partition or the contents of an entire hard drive onto a new hard drive. After cloning, the destination drive/partition will look identical to the source.
It must be possible, because they have an option to do exactly that for Windows hibernation and page files. Unfortunately they don't seem to have it plumbed through to the UI, so you can't specify arbitrary files that it should ignore. Might be worth a feature request. I can see it being useful for backing up the OS without having to include all the data.
You might also see if mondorescue works on your system. It is similar to clonezilla in capabilities, but is file-based and allows programming excludes. It's a bit pickier about the system configuration though.
If you really want to do this, I think it boils down to keeping your personal files separate from your system image backup, by backing them up in different ways.
Clonezilla creates more of a "system image" and it should be kept separate from your personal files and how you back them up. The reason for this is if you find yourself one day needing to restore the personal files to a separate computer, you can do so without worrying about the program and os files that you would need to operate your machine (instead you would just reinstall these on the other machine) and then you would have your personal files restored there.
Now what method do we use for keeping the OS and program files in the system image backup and the personal files in some other backup system (such as bareos or bacula)? Mounts, partitions, and LVM are all options for keeping these separate...for instance...
If your /home/ directory is where you keep your personal files, and is mounted on either a separate partition or LVM Logical Volume at boot time, when you make your system image, you can be sure that it isn't included in the system partition that contains /; that way when you run Clonezilla from a live USB to create a system image, you can choose to only back up the partitions that include the OS and program files, and not the partition or LVM Logical volume that contains your personal files, thus making the Clonezilla system image much smaller. And since you backed up the personal files separately, you can restore them the same way when migrating or doing disaster recovery on the same system.
