Clone Any System

what is the best way to back up and restore pretty much any computer out there i found a free and open source tool called clonezilla very very prominent a lot of people have used it however i wanted to make a video specifically over backing up and restoring from clonezilla because even though it's an awesome tool it's not exactly user friendly and some of the prompts really can be confusing so i want to walk you through the entire process i'm gonna do it on bare metal not a vm or any of that so you can actually see the entire process of backing up and restoring so with that let's get over on the desktop and go into clonezilla backing up and restoring check the timestamps if you just want to see a backup or a restore so with that let's do this so here is my current linux system i did a mac os modification to this one on popos so it looks a lot like mac big sur and i wanted to make an image for all of my members on the portal and i thought clonezilla would be a perfect way but before i make that video which is tomorrow i wanted to back up exactly what i have and if you're at home and you have your system set up a certain way having a backup on like a usb drive it's just a good idea and they're very universal you can take them between hardware i've never had really any issues restoring from one to the next so let's get into the full backup first off you need to actually go to clonezilla and download it if you're unfamiliar you can just go [Music] clonezilla.org this is all free and open software and you can see clonezilla we're just going to go to download on the left and then just download the stable release this is a very very easy thing to do and it'll just download the iso and you can burn it on windows using rufus if you're not familiar with rufus you can go to rufus.ie this is what the windows tool looks like and for linux i don't even use tools i just use command line so if you're interested in that obviously you can just go into your terminal pop it up and then just go sudo dd input file equals clonezilla output file equals dev your actual device that you put sdf block size equals 1m and then you can put status progress to burn this entire thing and if you're unsure what device is your usb drive you can always see a listing of that by just typing lsb okay and you can see all your devices on here right now i don't have a usb drive in because i've already burned this and it's plugged into our other pc so with that let's boot into clonezilla and actually start a backup and then we'll do a restore after so what we're going to do is just simply restart our computer and the low res is just because i'm using an out of band access a remote access tool so i can use it to jump into bios and other fun things without actually having actually be on the pc so i'll just tap delete to get into the bios if i go over to save and exit you'll see my usb disk right here and we can boot directly from that so we can hit enter here all right in here is our boot menu you can just kind of tack between i don't actually like the first option i always select the second one with is k uh kms with large font i find this one just gives a little bit better aesthetic now you saw a little artifacting there uh the other one the 800x600 i noticed on one of my screens on a different computer it never actually booted in it just kind of left that artifacting so that's why i kind of mentioned those other boot options the second option with the kms fonts i i tend to have the best luck with so i'm just going to select my language keep the layout and then you get this basic prompt which is fine we're just going to hit start clonezilla doing a lot of different things with clonezilla here you can do all kinds of really cool stuff most instances i'm always using the first option device to image i have also also used like device to device if i had two hard drives that i was just cloning and they're both plugged into the actual machine and i want one to be identical to the other that would be a good one but as far as the rest of these i really don't use those very much most of the time it's just device to image and this says hey what do you want to do are you backing up a local device like a usb external drive you would use local device however you can also do samba servers like let's say i wanted to use my synology nas box back there and back up this entire system directly to it you can actually back up and restore from that noz device since this is probably not what most people will be doing i'll go ahead and do local device but just know for this system i would prefer to do just a samba share for this video we're doing local device which i have a little usb drive here we'll go ahead and use so when you click this this is kind of again reading is important make sure you plug in the device you're going to use directly into there all right it's plugged in make sure you wait five seconds and then press the enter key all right shows all our different devices there i actually had another usb device just like the one i was using um so it should be the smi usb disk that we see so we'll go ahead hit control c i will say this is very intuitive because i think control c to cancel not to continue so this is where we select the destination i really wish they'd redo a lot of the the language in here again it can be confusing but this is the device that we're going to put our image on so i'm going to go ahead and say this device which i just plugged in and then we get to select what we want to do directory for the image repository boot efi i have something else on here which is fine and you can see the currently selected directory name right here you can kind of see that on this line you can see it's at the root of the device which is fine but let's say we wanted to do boot let's go ahead and just arrow down and say boot you notice how the current selected directory name change to boot so we don't really want that i want to go ahead and just put it in the root of the drive and tab over to done or use your mouse if you want so now it says the file disk space usage size 32 gig use four gigs available 28 gigs that's fine we'll hit enter to continue and i like to leave it on beginner mode and even then again you have to really re-read a lot of these options as they can get confusing so for this you're really always going to want save disk as you want to grab the boot partition the actual os everything this works for windows and linux the exact same way we'll use save disk now we go ahead and label this disk we'll we'll call this one mac os linux and they'll say okay what do you want to use as a source we only have one option because there's only one disk in this actual computer we'll set ok we'll also go ahead and skip checking and repairing source file systems and we'll go ahead and say no skip the check for the save image you can go ahead and check it if it's something you really need to make sure that it gets at all uh go ahead and do that however for just a brevity in this video i want to go ahead and skip the checking of the saved image and i'm not going to encrypt this image if you have sensitive data on it obviously encrypt it it's just a good thing to do and then i like to choose that'll say hey do you want to reboot or power down after it's done with the image so we'll hit enter we'll hit enter again and now it'll just go through and do our backup let's see what else we get usually you always have a confirmation hey it's gonna erase anything you know that type of thing watch these and read them very carefully because if you choose the wrong drive you could overwrite whatever's in that device which isn't good so we'll hit yes to continue and now we let it do its thing now this you can see the device size is roughly 27 gigs that's the main partition on here if you have a huge drive just note when you restore you'll need to have that exact same size drive or bigger what i like to do on big drives is shrink it down for this since i'm giving it out to all my members i wanted to make sure this partition was really small so i actually shrunk the main data partition of this drive to 30 gigs instead of being a whole 120 gigs it doesn't really matter for the actual size the image takes up because it will only take up as much data as there so it's only going to be about seven gigs big but i just wanted to make sure that when someone goes to restore this it'll actually restore to their device because if they don't have a 30 gig device they probably shouldn't be putting a whole operating system on there anyways so that's why i made it that size so now we have the check and it has finished saving all of this to this drive itself if you have problems at the very end of your actual backup session it should look like this when i did the first backup i actually pulled out the drive a little too soon it didn't actually sync and create a proper image this right here is what it should look like now that it's done that we can reboot and start all over from the start and restore our image so here it is again now we can start the restore process we'll simply just start device to image just like we were making that original backup local device we make sure we have our backup device in as well as our other one we do we'll hit continue it should show a device listing as it did before make sure that our usb disk that with all our images are on there it is so we'll go ahead and hit control c and now we get to select that again so we'll go ahead and select our usb disk and here is you can see a couple images i actually made this right here and i ejected it too quickly that was the first time around that was a failure you'll notice it says no subdirectory and this one says cz image this is a legit image now we don't need to select the images i just wanted to show you the different stuff on this usb drive i should have formatted it out there it should only be one directory but i want to kind of show a more complex scenario to where you can see what it would look like if there's other garbage on the actual drive you can see that img is here this one i won't be able to restore because it didn't properly finish that image the first time around and make sure you do not click this to select the image if it says current selector directory name is that or that make sure it's not that you want it to be to where the thing you're looking at in this screen is cz image something that kind of confused me the first time going through clonezilla just thought i'd mention it we'll hit done and enter beginner mode and this is where it should be if you only see save disk and save parts that means there's no valid image if you do see the other things obviously it sees that image and we can restore it so now let's go ahead and restore image to local disk this will overwrite this entire local disk but we're going to go ahead and do it just so you can see we'll restore this image file and we'll go ahead and just hit enter here and we'll go ahead and skip the check and we'll choose we'll hit enter again and we're off to the races and we'll go ahead and hit yes to continue can see all the warnings hey existing data will be erased after the initial check we'll go ahead and say yes to continue and it says are you really sure it will erase everything yes and after this part there is no going back everything on that local disk is now erased and it'll start the restore process once it finishes copying it'll do a sync just to make sure all the data and all the blocks are in place and we should be finished and there you see it part clone successfully restored the image to this device now if you had several partitions it will restore multiple partitions using this all right from the screen we'll just go ahead and reboot and we should see our desktop with the restored image and here we are we have our desktop so with our image all restored uh there was one last section to do is expanding that disk i highly recommend g parted for that you can't do it unless you actually boot into a live environment you can go to gparted.org however if you want to do all this and you're doing this a lot i highly recommend utility called parted magic for you windows users out there i probably just get that it's about 10 bucks and that has clonezilla and g parted on it to where you can just do this all in one fell swoop without having to boot into different cds but if you don't have any money or you just want to use the free and open source tools without anything you can just download each tool individually clonezilla.org and gparted.org for the live cds respectively that i used in this video but with all that said let me know your thoughts down in the comment section i love restoring and backing up pcs using clonezilla it's amazing and the fact it even supports network attached storage like i have back there with my synology it just blows me away that this is all free uh obviously as you can see it's not the most intuitive but that's okay it's still a fantastic tool and with that let me know your thoughts and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 196,534

Keywords: chris titus tech, Clone any system, how to clone hard drive, ssd, clone ssd, how to clone ssd, how to clone hard drive to ssd, clone hard drive, computer, hard drive cloning, hard disk cloning, pc, how to copy hard drive, windows 10, clone, free, acronis, hard drive, solid state drive, hdd, clone windows, how to copy partition, cloning, backup, tutorial, clone hard drive to ssd, windows 10 cloning, how to clone hard disk, clone hdd to ssd, computers, how to copy ssd, install ssd

Id: yQ9NpWZ74BU

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020