[Clonezilla-live] Suggested new menu for Clonezilla-Live

[Aaron W. <li...@wh...>]

Hello,

(Sending it again, as it seems my first one didn't make it through.)

I love Clonezilla and use it for backing up known-good states across 
both Windows and Gnu/Linux.

To me, the power of Clonezilla is right up there, or possibly ahead, of 
competing projects like Ghost.

I have been using Gnu/Linux now for about six years and am pretty 
comfortable with concepts such as mounting etc. I do, however, still 
find it very difficult and stressful to answer the questions correctly 
when backing up and restoring images. Two things that the current 
Clonezilla menu does that I think could be avoided are the following:
1) The current menu gives a lot of alternatives like "where would you 
like to save to/restore from". Where possible, it would be great if 
these were customised, so that when someone was backing up, it said 
"save to" and when they were restoring, it said "restore from".
2) The menu uses the concept of "partimag". I don't think that it is 
necessary to introduce this, unless the user chooses to drop to a shell 
and is manually mounting the location (in which case, it could be 
printed above the shell prompt).

As a suggestion (and please feel free not to follow it), I see the 
following menus as preferable (after the keymap etc. questions):

==
Do you wish to backup your computer's disk/partition to a Clonezilla 
image or restore from a Clonezilla image to one of your computer's 
disks/partitions?
(a) Backup to an image
(b) Restore from an image
==
Do you wish to [backup/restore to, depending on the answer to the above] 
an entire disk, or just a partition of a disk?
(a) An entire disk
(b) A partition
==
[If backing up:] Which [disk/partition, depending on the answer to the 
above] would you like to backup?
[If restoring:] Where is the Clonezilla image that you would like to 
restore?
==
[If backing up:] Where would you like to save the image of this 
[disk/partition, depending on the above answer]?
[If restoring:] Which [disk/partition, depending on the above answer] 
would you like to overwrite with this Clonezilla image? WARNING: this 
will delete anything that is currently on this [disk/partition, 
depending on the above answer].
==
[Existing final questions about compression etc., though no "mode" 
question should be necessary, as it should use "savedisk" if question 1 
was "(a) backup" and question 2 was "(a) An entire disk", restoreparts 
if the answers were (b), (b) and so on.]
=====

Not only do I find these questions a lot clearer, but I think that they 
better reflect the way that people think about the process. If I asked 
someone what they wanted Clonezilla to do, I would expect them to say 
that they wanted to "Backup their disk to an external hard drive" (note 
that this sentence fits question 1, 2 and 3 in order), or "Restore the 
image that I have on this DVD over the top of the windows partition". It 
also fits with the way that most copying tools work, eg "cp /from/here 
/to/here" (matching question 1, 2 and 3 in order above).

Using Clonezilla is a very anxious procedure at the best of times, as 
the risks of something going seriously wrong (if a user gets things the 
wrong way around, for example) are high. I therefore think it would be 
excellent if the menus were as clear as possible.

I'm happy to discuss these thoughts further, but I am not on the list, 
so please CC me in.

Please take this in the way that it was intended. Your software is 
absolutely brilliant, so I wanted to do my best to help with something 
that I can help with -- which is making things clearer to users.

Regards,

Aaron