Clonezilla failed to clone FAT32 parittion
A partition and disk imaging/cloning program
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steven_shiau
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This software is so user unfriendly. I mean there is a "wizzard" where you select the things and when you reach the end and partition failed the CRC check you can go thorugh all the menues again from the start and do the whole cloning again (even if only one partition failed to clone). instead of an option of just redoing the paritiion until the clone is good enough a menu is presented to shutdown reboot or do it all over again. I read a lot of thread on how clonezilla is awesome but when i tried to use it it failed miserably.
Why is there no GUI? If you have text based menues why is there no option to go back and change your setting? Or set it all up first on one page and then do it. Why are the instructions so vague only to then clearly warn the user of the horrors that await them if they made a mistake in the configuration.
Now what i was trying to do is first back up (clone) a 10 GB disk with 2 fat 32 parittions onto an external USB drive. convert both into NTFS and then move both parittions on a new larger drive making the OS partition larger and then making the data partition larger. now having failed to create a simple backup image of this hard drive all leads me to belive that this project is very poorly concieved from the start (afterall FAT32 is not an unusual format standard on older drivers or on USB). it is not made from users perspective but from the programmes perspective. porgramme works in certain way (loading modules as it progresses) and users have to addapt to this.
at least beginners mode should be very very simple and easy to understand. i mean if i just remember the Mintbackup with their 4 buttons 2 for backup (one for OS settings, one for data) 2 for restore. i am not saying it should be so simplistic, but these is the new millenium while clonezilla interface is on par with first OSes from the 80's of the previous century (again not talking about textual nature of menues but the lack of for example multitasking or overview of the settings…).
sorry for the rant, i know this is an opensource project, however i've seen many of these with fantastic interfaces and better experience than proprietary software ever offered. but i am also sorry to say that clonezilla doens' t come close to them. i dare you to convince me otherwise. also you can tell me what i did wrong that the cloning failed.
Clonezilla is _NOT_ perfect. That's why we keep improving that.
We did not spend the time on the GUI interface, and it's because we do not have too many developers. We focus on the TUI, and we believe it's suitable for a system administrator. For the time being we only have a GUI called pyDRBL which is for Clonezilla SE.
As for your problem about FAT32, if you can, please show us the error messages so that it's easier for us to see why.
Steven.
Well it doesnt' realyl have to be a fancy GUI or it can even be in text just it should have more sense and the ability to go back and change thing. For example Cleo Bare Metal Backup (runs on top of Ubuntu), goes perhapos even a bit too far. As it loads the whole Gnome. But the backup is very simple (where from, where to, any additional options, review of setup…) and at each stage you can go back. in the end it writes down all the settings you made and if you want you can just go back in the wizzard and change only the step you want to change as opposed to Clonezilla where you have to redo the whole procedure. a similar thing is in Linux Mint Backup tool (though i think this one just compressed the data)
I see that the product is mainly aimed at sysadmins, but why not make it simple for common user (the kind that never met linux perhaps) as well? I mean more and more people these days store their data in digital form and need to create backups and clones of their drives.
graphics don't really matter here. it can all be in text form as is now. but there is no ability to go back because mudules are loaded as you go instead of all at once. this might make it smaller and use less ram but unelss you know what happens in the background the process is very difficult to understand. a GUI's funcion should be to execute commands in the back sort of hidden from users view as the user (that is not sysadmiin) is usually not interested in exactly what command was run.
It is really hard to compare this product and call it an opensource alternative to Norton Ghost when the user experience is not even close to Ghosts. I really hope you get some developer than can make some friendly interface as i really prefer using opensource alternatives whenever possible.
Ah wish i had a camera… Or probably i could dump the error message to a log file? basically it said that (after the verification) the image it created was bad. and promted me to redo it. as too much time was spend on this image we called it a day…
Thanks for the suggestion.
"it can even be in text just it should have more sense and the ability to go back and change thing." -> If you know how to have an option to have back button on a "dialog" menu, please let us know.
Thanks.
Steven.
Unfortunatelly i am not developer but only a user. However my brother found Redo backup: http://redobackup.org/
Nice GUI, using the light Openbox, stis on top of Ubuntu. We are testing it now. In the background it says it uses same or similar tools as clonezilla.
Again what i was looking for is not something for servers and major system cloning but simple backup/cloning programme for private/personal use. Clonezilla might still be a better solution for servers.
Yes, sure. There are a lot of alternative choices, and everyone might find a good one fit his need.
Steven.