Can't Backup Any of My Drives Using Rescuezilla nor Restore Any Clonezilla images using Rescuezilla

[Talisman]

Hi,

First time RescueZilla user / long time Clonezilla user.

I am testing out RescueZilla for the first time but can't seem to get it to
backup any of my drives nor do a restore using clonezilla images. I of
course have no issues using Clonezilla backing up or restoring?

Using the latest version of RescuZilla (downloaded very recently) and
attempting to backup any one of my drives installed on my system to my NAS
device using Samba. I get this error:

"Error creating backup: Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rescuezilla/backup_manager.py", line
131, in do_backup_wrapper
self.do_backup()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rescuezilla/backup_manager.py", line
245, in do_backup
process, flat_command_string, failed_message = Utility.run("Saving
Info-lshw.txt", ["lshw"], use_c_locale=True,
output_filepath=info_lshw_filepath, logger=self.logger)
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/rescuezilla/utility.py", line 502,
in run
process = subprocess.run(cmd_list, encoding='utf-8',
capture_output=True, env=env)
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 503, in run
stdout, stderr = process.communicate(input, timeout=timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 1152, in communicate
stdout, stderr = self._communicate(input, endtime, timeout)
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 2041, in _communicate
stdout = self._translate_newlines(stdout,
File "/usr/lib/python3.10/subprocess.py", line 1029, in
_translate_newlines
data = data.decode(encoding, errors)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xed in position 40517:
invalid continuation byte"

When trying to restore any of my Clonezilla images it basically errors out
saying that there must have been an error when Clonzilla made the image and
so there is nothing to restore. Yet again I can restore using that same
image with Clonezilla.

What am I doing wrong?

Marty

[Rescuezilla]

Hi Talisman,

Sorry to here about your experience here.

You're not doing anything wrong: this is a bug in Rescuezilla. It's trying to run the command to list the hardware on your system and save it to a file, purely for informational purposes (not used for the backup/restore). Clonezilla runs the same command to save the same file for the same reason.

But Rescuezilla is clearly failing here, because it can't process the output of the external program.

I had a similar error reported 2 weeks ago when a different Rescuezilla tries to save some other information using a different command (#412).

Clearly there's a systemic issue with how Rescuezilla v2.4.2 and earlier are handling the external programs being used, as it's not able to process the output.

I have also heard of other users claiming to have seen a stacktrace/backtrace error message, but I don't have insight into what that error was (users appear vehemently against including any kind of automated error reporting, so I need to build out a manual error reporting mechanism so I can receive these reports and fix them faster).

In my previous testing, I haven't seen this issue on my test environment. I will try and figure it out, because it obviously causes a terrible user experience for Rescuezilla.

Separately to your second issue, your Clonezilla images may not have worked because Rescuezilla's support for images created by Clonezilla is lagging behind that program (#372).

Basically Rescuezilla added Clonezilla support back in June 2021 (when the latest release was Clonezilla v2.7.2), and is fully-interoperable with that. Rescuezilla continues to act like an old version of Clonezilla, so really needs to be refreshed to catch up to the latest version of Clonezilla.

I will be taking several weeks off work to work on Rescuezilla starting in a few weeks time. There's a lot of features I want to develop, but clearly improving stability needs to be the first priority.

Apologies again for the terrible user-experience you've just had.

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I had similar errors trying to clone 1TB SATA-in-USB -> 1TB SATA. I had to resort to a LiveUSB of Fedora to manually copy the files.

System specs: i5 12500, MSI Z690-A DDR4, 32 GB DDR4-3600 CL18, tested with both an Arc A770 and RTS 3060. Both needed Graphical fallback mode to work.

I'm now really worried that the images I made of my laptop's SSD a month ago won't be restoreable should I need to "refresh" it back to a OOB state for sale.

I will anxiously await new releases of RescueZila.

[Gary L Webb]

I downloaded the new version (rescuezilla-2.5.1-64bit.noble.iso) and could not perform a backup. The screen just sat at info-lshw.txt for over 10 minutes. I reverted back to clonezilla 3.2.0-5 which works fine. Also when i go to browse existing .img files created with clonezilla, It is unable to view them with rescuzilla. I am not using bitlocker on windows 10. Sorry i don't have the exact error message. I can get it if you need it and give you system information if it will help.

Thank,
Gary