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

[Steven S. <st...@nc...>]

Hi Aaron,
Thanks for proposing this. Yes, the way you showed is much better then 
the menus we have now. We will think about this and try to implement 
this in the future.
If we started to work on this, we will let you know.
Thanks again.

Regards,
Steven.

Aaron Whitehouse wrote:
> 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
>
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-- 
Steven Shiau <steven _at_ nchc org tw> <steven _at_ stevenshiau org>
National Center for High-performance Computing, Taiwan. http://www.nchc.org.tw
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