Feature request: full disk _cloning_
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#297 Feature request: full disk _cloning_
With Clonezilla as it presently is, there seems to be no way to clone full disks.
Note, by "clone" here, I mean it in the standard industry sense. A bit-perfect copy of the original.
eg read from (say) /dev/sda and save it to a file for future use.
Saying that because I just went to clone a full disk (512GB SSD), as I need to use it temporarily for a high IO activity. When that's completed, I'll restore the original drive contents back to it.
I've used Clonezilla occasionally over the years, but this is the first time I've needed a full disk clone. In this instance, Clonezilla barfed (even using -q1) with an error about mismatching MBR and GPT partitions.
That pretty clearly means Clonezilla wasn't going to do a full disk clone. If it was, then whatever the contents of any structure is on disk (no matter how weird or magical)... wouldn't matter. :)
At a guess, Clonezilla's present approach to full device cloning is to copy the data inside each partition on the disk (individually) instead + store some geometry info.
Note for my use case I just went back to using "dd if=/dev/sdX [etc]" on the full disk which works as expected.
So this feature request is to support actual full disk cloning. There seem to be open bugs about Clonezilla not supporting encrypted disks either. Getting full disk cloning done would probably be on the path to getting encrypted disks supported too. :)
"an error about mismatching MBR and GPT partitions" -> I believe this is the key issue. Clonezilla has to parse your partition table then basically saves "full disk" by actually saves partitions. You'd better to fix "an error about mismatching MBR and GPT partitions" which sometimes can confuse some programs or OS so that Clonezilla can do that for you. Otherwise it's something like like "dd" does ("dd if=/dev/sdX [etc]" as you mentioned), you do not need Clonezilla for that purpose at all.
Steven
Ahhh, I was probably a bit unclear or overly verbose.
I'm trying to submit a feature request for Clonezilla to clone full disks as actual full disks (instead of partition-by-partition), so any partition structure present (if any) isn't taken into account.
Sure, maybe not by default, but it would be a useful "Advanced" option for some use cases. :)
Last edit: Justin Clift 2018-04-22
Since there is:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
I do not think it's necessary to have this feature in Clonezilla.
Since it's not partition-by-partition, then Partclone can not play any role. The program dd is the best tool.
Of course we can force to have a disk dd mode in Clonezilla in the future. However, there are so many things to do. we will put this in very low priority.
Steven