Rescuezilla: Graphical interoperable alternative to Clonezilla

[Rescuezilla]

Hi everyone,

I would like to announce the release of Rescuezilla v2.0, a graphical Clonezilla-compatible disk imaging application that's of course open-source (licensed under the GPLv3).

Many users of Clonezilla may wish to try out Rescuzilla.

Rescuezilla is an fork of Redo Backup and Recovery (now called Redo Rescue) after that application had been abandoned for 7 years.

As part of making Rescuezilla v2.0, I have developed strong knowledge the Clonezilla codebase, so over the coming weeks, months and years I intend to collaborate and contribute with Clonezilla and its wonderful developer Steven Shiau who has worked tirelessly (and often thanklessly) for decades developing Clonezilla, and providing thousands of users with world-class user support.

Screenshots

For decades, Clonezilla has been the defacto standard for disk imaging, so its understandably many conservative industrial users will be initially apprehensive about trying a new tool. That's OK, and conservative users can always introduce Rescuezilla into their workflow incrementally (for example, by continuing to use Clonezilla to create the backup and starting to use Rescuezilla for the restore operation.)

In the longer-term, I am open to merging the Clonezilla and Rescuezilla projects. In the shorter-term I hope to implement other applications and features, such as a graphical and command-line tool to extract individual files from backup images.

I'm aware of the fact it may not be polite to use an actively used forum to discuss Rescuezilla, but hopefully this one thread won't be too much of a problem. I think development and discussion that takes place in public is the best and healthiest approach to develop software. However, Steven Shiau, if you would prefer to talk privately, you can email me: rescuezilla at gmail.

Download: https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases/latest

Regards,

Shasheen Ediriweera

Rescuezilla developer

[Steven Shiau]

It's good to know someone is working on this. Diversity is the key to FOSS. Thanks for sharing this.

Steven

[Rescuezilla]

No problem! It's good to finally get in touch with you. I wanted to have something concrete completed before I contact you and I'm very happy with how Rescuezilla v2.0 turned out.

I agree diversity is a very useful in free and open-source software development. I am happy to continue development of Rescuezilla independently at this stage.

[Rescuezilla]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let everyone know that I have created an easy-to-use graphical tool to mount Clonezilla images, as part of my graphical drop-in replacement to Clonezilla called Rescuezilla:

Currently I'm using partclone-nbd as I found it had better support for some filesystems than the more popular partclone-utils, but I intend on switching to partclone-utils in the future because that also supports ntfsclone which is used by Clonezilla. To create a solid foundation for this work, I am unifying the many partclone-utils forks among other improvements.

It's very nice to not need to remember the specific command-line details around logically concatenating partclone images then decompressing them :-)

Unfortunately to access the final byte in a gzip-compressed images it involves decompressing all prior data. (gzip is currently the default compression in Clonezilla and Rescuezilla). This makes mounting large (50GB+) images too slow to be usable. I will try and support better compression settings in the future.

For now, I recommend advanced users who intend on relying on Image Explorer functionality to be creating uncompressed images using Clonezilla's Expert Mode, as these images work instantaneously

I am happy to do the immediate maintenance work on partclone-utils, but I have enough open-source work on my hands without becoming the long-term partclone-utils maintainer. I am hoping to get the project "upstreamed" into partclone itself once I have made some improvements.

I really recommend users interested in partclone-utils try the Image Explorer frontend. Rescuezilla will become available in the package managers of regular Linux distributions

Click here to download the latest version of Rescuezilla. Also, consider contributing $1/month on the crowdfunding website Patreon so that Rescuezilla can continue to be developed!

[Robert Weir]

Nice effort.

[Robinson]

Fails on my system. Tried both builds. Kernel panic and other nasty things.

[ski-777]

Could use a better graphical interface for Clonezilla :-)

[Rescuezilla]

What do you mean, ski-777?

Are you suggesting changing Rescuezilla's user-interface design?

Or for more/better features?

Or bug fixes / more frequent recent releases based on newer versions of Linux kernel for better hardware support?

As far as I'm aware, Rescuezilla continues to be the only acceptable Clonezilla graphical interface available and is fully-compatible with images created by Clonezilla.

Happy to try and improve it if you and other Clonezilla users have suggestions.

[ski-777]

Yes I know ... thanks for the GUI / Clonezilla work
but I was thinking about a full GUI, which is one that supports all Clonezilla functions. Also the advanced ones that are sometimes needed.

[Rescuezilla]

Which advanced Clonezilla functions are you most interested in seeing?

[ski-777]

I do not know if it is possible, for example, to clone a disk to a new one with a smaller capacity without additional entries from advanced options, etc.
Is it possible to use all options from the CloneZilli ... menu (TUI - text interface) in the GUI graphical menu?

[Rescuezilla]

I do not know if it is possible, for example, to clone a disk to a new one with a smaller capacity without additional entries from advanced options, etc.

In order to successfully clone (or restore image) to a disk smaller than the original, currently both Clonezilla and Rescuezilla need the final partition on the source disk to be manually shrunken using a tool like GParted Partition Editor so that everything fits on the destination disk.

With Clonezilla you also need to go to advanced options and enable -k1 (to create partition table proportionally), and -icds (Skip checking destination disk size before creating partition table).

But Rescuezilla has the -k1 behavior enabled by default, because my analysis determined there was no downside. And -icds is also not required because Rescuezilla detects the potentially unsafe situations and either blocks them, or provides plenty of warning and 'Are You Sure' dialogs.

With these optimizations, I found that that Rescuezilla hasn't yet needed an 'advanced options' page to work the way the user expects.

However, both Clonezilla and Rescuezilla would greatly benefit from being able to automatically restore to disks smaller than original (task #18). This would allow both tools to skip the manual GParted Partition Editor step described above.

[Rescuezilla]

Is it possible to use all options from the CloneZilli ... menu (TUI - text interface) in the GUI graphical menu?

Which of the following options advanced Clonezilla would you like to see implemented Rescuezilla? The Rescuezilla's workflow is not a 1-to-1 reflection of Clonezilla's workflow so often the best way to implement certain options like -k1 is not to have a specific advanced option checkbox.