Discussion on:

Five free and reliable cloning tools

It is an invaluable process if you are reusing an old machine for something else and no-one is completely sure who it belongs to etc. When someone has asked to have a machine re-built from scratch and promises to back-up their old data or swears they store it all on a network share etc. A good problem prevention situation!

Curses-based interface? (Clonezilla)

I have been trying to use a curses-based interface on my computer for years with no luck. Maybe I'm not using the right swear words?

It may sound funny, but so it is. Years ago, using curses was a great way to write user interfaces for use in monitor like the VT52 that used the terminfo spec.

Sure, you can use curses for many things since then

See http://www.gnu.org/software/ncurses/ for more on (serious) curses

If you have a Seagate drive, then you can download the free Seagate DiscWizard.
(If you purchase a Seagate drive to store your images, then you qualify, to use the program.)
If you use Western Digital, they too have a version of the DiscWizrd.

The download is a program that requires installation.
When you first run the installed program, you can find an option to create a bootable CD.
Use the bootable CD to do all your imaging, Verifying, restoring.
Do not be doing imaging / restoring from within a running Windows.
You can, if you like, keep the installed program, installed.
That allows you to browse within any of your images, to retrieve individual files, if the need arises.

I would purchase an external Dock (with USB, and eSata connections).
Purchase a Seagate 3.5" drive, and shove it vertically into the Dock.
Use that to store your images.
If you have USB3 on your PC, no doubt there are some docks, that provide that connector, as well.

The latest version of DiscWizard, makes it a little harder to find the 'Verify an image'. But the option is there, and should be used, immediately after creating your images.

I use the program all the time, and found it to be 100% reliable.

So Clonezilla has a "curses-based interface"? No wonder some users might find it challenging!

While I certainly like the idea of "free", there's one thing that I'm not sure of with all the tools mentioned... The article title refers to "cloning". That, to me, suggests that, if my internal hard drive crashes, I could take the "cloned" disk, (USB drive, etc.) replace my fried drive with it, boot up and continue working as if the original drive were still in place. Some of these products refer to storing backups in XML format, so that's obviously not a cloned drive. I'd really like to see a differentiation between a true, usable, bootable cloned disk, and a backup, which requires a new drive and a bare-metal restore from it.

I've used products (Acronis True Image, for one) that will copy a drive bit-for-bit and enlarge or shrink the partition on the new drive, as long as all the data will fit on the new partition. I've gone from a 250GB drive to a 500GB drive as well as the reverse. The new drive takes over as the boot drive and life goes on. I believe I've also used CloneZilla to do that, but the writeup on Redo doesn't give that assurance. Will all/some/any of these products do that? I wish the article would have been more specific.

Thanks also to Palmetto_CharlieSpencer for his tip on putting a cloned drive on new hardware. I may have thought of that on my own (eventually), but it was a great "reminder" to see it in print.

I have used XXClone for some time. It is a tad tricky with questions thrown at the user in the beginning, but if the user reads the available manual, it isn't so bad. With XXClone, it can be made to do test boots to see if it is a good copy when booting. The only drawback is that when booting, there is a question; if the user wants to boot with the regular hard drive or the XXClone hard drive. http://www.xxclone.com/

for example
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
if= input drive or partition
of = output drive or partition
works also with "files" and pipes as source or destination...
you may think to zip dest file for example.

incremental. Mainly because I have 2 large USB Drives and then a NAS for backups. I don't know which of these is a better incremental.
Since my NAS is a mirror RAID, or at least I plan to, the USB drives will be re-structured for a better access for files ( and a better search capability ).
Anyway, My current NAS is just NETGEAR, and Its an experiment. I am essentially doubling on Backup because the Power Stability here is not too good.

EASEUS Todo Backup Home

does the job...