[Clonezilla-live] newbie usage questions

[Ersek, L. <la...@ca...>]

Hi,

sorry for the lame questions ahead; I've never used clonezilla before and 
I'd like to get some info in advance. (I did browse the FAQ and the rest 
of the website first.)

I have to transfer the contents of a single source disk to another disk:

   # lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,MOUNTPOINT,LABEL,SIZE,TYPE /dev/sda

   NAME                                        FSTYPE      MOUNTPOINT              LABEL          SIZE TYPE  "FSAVAIL"
   sda                                                                                          465.8G disk
   |-sda1                                      ext3                                RHEL5-64-/      20G part  15G
   |-sda2                                      LVM2_member                                        300G part
   | |-VolGroup0-VG0swap (dm-0)                swap        [SWAP]                                   8G lvm
   | |-VolGroup0-VG0home (dm-1)                ext3        /home                                   64G lvm   51G
   | |-VolGroup0-VG0varlibxen (dm-2)           ext3                                               128G lvm   53G
   | |-VolGroup0-VG0varliblibvirtimages (dm-3) ext3        /var/lib/libvirt/images                 50G lvm   44G
   | `-VolGroup0-VG0filestore (dm-4)           ext3        /filestore              VG0filestore    50G lvm   31G
   |-sda3                                      ext3                                RHEL5-32-/      20G part  13G
   |-sda4                                                                                           1K part
   |-sda5                                      ext3        /                       RHEL6-64-/    19.1G part  13G
   |-sda6                                      ext3                                RHEL6-32-/    19.1G part  14G
   |-sda7                                                                                        19.1G part
   `-sda8                                                                                        19.1G part

There's about 51G free space (unpartitioned) at the end of the drive.

The "FSAVAIL" column was added manually by yours truly, using "df -h".

sda7 and sda8 are Linux partitions, but unformatted.

(1) Is this layout fully supported by Clonezilla Live 1.2.12-60? (I intend 
to use the Debian-based stable release). Does it matter if a logical 
volume is "linear" (ie. one contiguous chunk in a PV) or not?

(2) How much space am I going to need approximately, before compression? I 
reckon Clonezilla will copy the partitioning / LVM metadata, and the 
non-free blocks in the ext3 filesystems I have. So about 136 GB in total. 
Does that seem correct?

(3) I'd like to specify a non-default compression method, eg. pigz. Where 
do I pass the "--smp-gzip-compress" option?

(4) The receiving end will be an adjacent SSH server. Can I make sure, 
from the Clonezilla side, that the ssh connection itself won't use 
compression or a CPU-hungry cipher? (aes128-cbc is good for me, for 
example.) I could do this on the Clonezilla side, by editing 
"$HOME/.ssh/config" before the ssh connection is started. Is this 
supported?

(5) After the backup process finishes, can I somehow verify the archive's 
integrity / completeness (without a full restore)? The source disk will be 
irrevocably gone at "real restore" time.

Thank you very much,
Laszlo