I’ve been trying out some cloning solutions as Clonezilla failed to restore a working system when I cloned my Fedora 14 install.

I tried Acronis True Image Home 2011 PlusPack, and that was a bit odd – I can get past grub, but that’s about it – I think its not liking the UUID’s or something with the encrypted partitions. Possibly this is because it wanted to auto-grow the /boot partition from 500Mb to 6Gb!

So now I’ve tried the most basic option – an Ubuntu 11.04 LiveCD and dd – and I successfully restored the disk image into VirtualBox to test it out.

The commands are as follows – note that reading in chunks of 4k is optimised for SSD’s and the 80Gb backup took about 40mins:

Backup:

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dd if=/dev/sda of=/var/tmp/ntfs/backup.img bs=4096

Restore:

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dd if=/var/tmp/ntfs/backup.img of=/dev/sda bs=4096

I used an unencrypted NTFS USB drive to store the images as it takes out the hassle of device-mapper (encryption) permissions (ext3), network setup (NFS/samba) and file-splitting (FAT32).

Update: upgraded the blog to WordPress 3.2