Whole Disk Backup options

General Help
1

I was trying to get OO DiskImage Pro (v14, licensed, a Windows program) installed via the PlayOnLinux method.
It sorta works, the installer runs, up until near the end (presumably) at which point it Fails with an unspecified error, and no OO DiskImage Pro program is shown as runable in the menus.

So my two questions are:

  1. Is there something different that I could do with DiskImage Pro to get it to run on Zorin Core 16.3? (has anyone accomplished this?)
    FYI for reference, here is info on DiskImage Pro: https://www.oo-software.com/en/diskimage-backup-your-data

  2. Find a user-friendly Linux clone tool -- I looked at some available backup programs: Deja Dup, Clonezilla, Rescuezilla.

I installed and ran Deja Dup, which works, and copies user home data to an external target drive. But does not replicate the ability of OO DiskImage Pro.
I installed Clonezilla, (via Synaptic package manager), and then could not find a menu item. Which caused me to look a bit deeper and I saw a few critical things to note:

  1. It can only operate on NON-mounted source disks
  2. It therefor requires the setting up of a bootable Clonezilla live and using its command-line/character-based UI. Which is why there is nothing to run from within Zorin OS UI.
  3. the target (new) drive must be equal or larger than the source (copied) drive.

This could be doable, but it is not a good solution for the non-tech user and does not really replace OO DiskImage, which could copy the entire computer HDD (or selected partitions) while the Windows OS was running, and would write that image file (.omg) to an external drive. And could make that drive bootable. Thus it was really easy to have the user run from within Windows.

is there some program or sequence of steps to get the same thing accomplished?

The Object being: Create a full image of the computer HDD, write it to an external drive so that an event of a total crash, the system could be resurrected by restoring/writing the external image to a new main drive.
And do this for all or selected internal drives, since we are running ZORIN OS 16.3 CORE as a dual boot on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon's internal SSD with Windows 10. So it has both Windows NTFS and Zorin EXT4 volume partitions. (sorry for the long question.)

2

Have you looked into Timeshift app?

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Disks is a freebie, comes with Zorin and in the installer.

For your internal / Zorin installed disk, you would need to use the Live USB installer, create the image, then reboot as normal. After the creation, you can use Disks again to write the .img file wherever needed without Live USB :grin:

Timeshift is also another good one :+1:

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Second that... that's what I use. Just select the drive you want, click the '3 vertical dots' button, select "Create Disk Image", select somewhere to save the .IMG file, then compress it after it's done if you want to save disk space.

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5

I use it for everything!

PiShrink sometimes can help cut out empty space too; not just RPi images either. Just has to be a .img file and it should shrink empty space to fit on smaller drives - or save space :grin:

6

Thx all for the suggestions. I'll give those a try.

1 Like
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