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I have my ubuntu 14.04 system in one partition (I do not have an extra partition for home) while I have date in another partition. I regularly backup data using a backup tool (areca) but I was wondering how to backup my system (including apps) so I started looking for imaging tools, things like dd, tar, or clonezilla. But I found the imaging feature of disks and it this works, it seems pretty neat to me. boot with ubuntu image, make an image of the partition and in case of big failure, boot again with ubuntu image and restore the image. To me that sounds like clonezilla but I would like to know if this sounds correct and if there's anyone out there that has used it. I have found this Is the create disk image in the disks utility like clonezilla?, but it is not clear to me from the answer how is that imaging a partition with disks utility is any different from using clonezilla. Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Javier

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Clonezilla is smart enough to recognize most filesystems and skip the free space, reducing the size of the image. The disks utility is not so smart and just copies everything. Also clonezilla can further compress the image reducing its size even more. Due to the lack of these features, the gnome disk utility's current image support isn't practically usable.

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    Thank you for your reply. I wanted to make an image of a 47 GB partition (18 GB free). The image with disks utility is obviously 47 GB big while the one with clonezilla is just 18 GB big. So you're totally correct. Clonezilla was able to further compress the 29 GB of data in my partition. However, about usability if space is not a big deal (and it is not in my case) I find the disks utility very easy to use and the GUI helps make things clearer. Regarding imaging time I did not record the times but I think clonezilla was even slower than disks (clonezilla included image verificarion)
    – Javier
    Jan 5, 2015 at 0:14
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  1. You should always have more than one backup: By Murphy's Law The (only) backup will fail, be corrupt or whatever just when you need it most.
  2. At least once (e.g. or annually) test restoring your backup to a different temporary/old/unused disk
  3. Clonezilla becomes more useful once you are dealing with disks of several hundred GB, or when you want to backup specific partitions.

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