Rescuezilla: Disk Imaging Made Easy

hello and welcome to buy my pie before we get started i'd like to say a big thank you to everyone that's subscribed to my channel as it's now topped 1000 subscribers and now on with the video when you use a computer long enough there can come a time when disaster strikes it could be in the form of malware a virus or even the hardware itself giving up the ghost whatever the cause wouldn't it be great if we could roll back the clock to before everything went pear-shaped fortunately with the help of a specific type of software we can do precisely that the process we'll be looking at in this video is known as disk imaging and it enables us to make an exact copy of our entire setup operating system programs and all so that should our pc take a catastrophic nosedive into digital destruction we can get back up and running with the minimum amount of foot to do this we'll be using the free and open source rescuezilla which works with windows mac and linux so if this sounds of interest to you stick around to get started besides the computer we would like to image we'll also need a usb stick a capacity of 2 gigabytes or more will be plenty this will be dedicated to the task of running rescuezilla think of it as your backup and recovery device but it's important to note that the actual image or images we create will not be stored on the usb stick which brings us to the next consideration there are a couple of ways we can store an image of our computer the first is on an external device like a usb hard drive for example the second is to save it to a network share such as that on a home server or network attached storage box in this video we'll look at both of these scenarios so without further ado let's get cracking you can think of creating a backup image like taking a photo or snapshot of your system everything the operating system program settings files and folders is saved at that exact moment as though frozen in time then if you later restore the image your computer returns to that precise point it's as though anything that occurred afterwards never happened the first thing we need to do is download the software so open your web browser and search for rescuezilla and it's this one rescuezilla.com let's head to the download section and download the latest live image by clicking on the link and then save that to your computer we also need to get some software to copy rescue ziller onto our usb stick so this time search for etcher and it's this one here at bolina.io i'm going to download the portable version and save that to my computer as well and when you've got those you can close your web browser okay let's go and find them in file explorers downloads directory if you haven't already now is the time to connect your usb stick to your computer and then we're going to double click etcher to launch the software once the program opens select flash from file and then locate and open rescuezilla hopefully etcher has automatically detected your usb stick if not you can click on change to select it and when you're ready to proceed click on flash and select yes to continue if you get a message about formatting the disk just cancel it and with the flash complete we can close the program and remove the usb stick from our computer first then we're going to create an image of our pc onto an external usb hard drive make sure that the rescuezilla usb stick is plugged into the computer and that the external hard drive is connected as well we haven't discussed when is a good time to create a system image i would suggest that whenever you purchase a new pc this is one of the first things that you do that way you always have a backup image to restore the computer to its factory settings which is especially handy if you ever decide to sell it you can see that this computer is at the start of its windows 10 setup which as i just mentioned is a great time to image it so let's first shut it down in order to do this we can do that by holding down the shift key on our keyboard and tapping f10 to access the command prompt from there type shutdown space forward slash s space forward slash t space zero the forward slash s tells the computer to shut down as opposed to say restart and the forward slash t stands for timeout in other words how long before the command is executed in this case zero seconds or immediately so let's press the enter key to run the command as we turn on the computer we need to tap the relevant key to access its boot menu if it doesn't have a boot menu you'll need to do this in the uefi or bios we're looking to choose our usb stick the one with ziller on it so i'll use the cursor keys to do just that and press enter to boot from it again you can use the cursor keys to choose your required language and then press enter to select it if you experience any issues with rescue zilla not displaying correctly you can restart your computer and try the graphical fallback mode but in the first instance select start rescuezilla here we have rescuezilla's welcome screen which having only three options keeps things nice and straightforward so the one we want right now is backup you need to select the drive that you want to back up which for me is this 120 gigabyte ssd and then click on next unless you know what you're doing and have a good reason for changing this you'll want to leave all of the partitions selected and then click on next again here we need to select the destination drive for our backup image so leave connected directly to my computer selected and then click on the external drive which in my case is this one terabyte usb then click on next once again by default the image will be created on the root of your external drive but to keep things tidy let's create a folder to put it in to do this click on browse and then click on the little folder icon at the top right give the new folder a name i'm just going to call mine bite my pie and then click on create with that done click on ok you can see now that it's going to put my image into my new bike my pi folder so i'll click on next to continue you can either stick with the default name for your image or if you'd sooner you can give it a more meaningful name and when you're ready to proceed click on next once more finally we get a chance to confirm that everything's correct before we create the image and if you're happy to continue click on next even though this is only imaging windows as i haven't yet added any extra software or data to this computer this process will still take a little while so i'll pause the video and come back when it's complete great so the backup image saved successfully and that took 8.1 minutes as it tells us so i'll click on next and that returns us to the rescuezilla welcome screen to finish we can open the menu at the bottom left of the screen and shut down the computer and then click shut down again to do so with the usb drive connected to our computer we can view the backup image in file explorer click on the drive letter that corresponds to your usb device and you'll either see the name of your image or the name of the subdirectory if you created one so here's the image i created it's actually a folder and we can double click on it to have a look inside contained within are all of the files related to the system image of particular note are the gz or gzip files which belong to the compressed image and there we have our backup image by the way if we return to the root of the usb drive while i personally prefer to keep things separate and dedicate a drive to backups there's nothing stopping you from storing other data on here as well just don't put it in your image directory it's important to note that you should only restore an image onto the same type of hardware from which it was created for example an image created from a dell pc shouldn't be used to try and recover a computer manufactured by lenovo in the event of hardware failure in order to avoid further issues the faulty component should ideally be replaced with an identical part before the image is restored while it's best to stick to this policy as much as possible one exception is internal storage it's fine to replace this with a different brand and even a different capacity providing the new drive is at least the same size as the original in other words if the computer came with a 500 gigabyte hard drive the replacement should also be 500 gigabytes or larger so taking these considerations into account let's get to it let's say something goes wrong with your computer in this case windows is no longer detected so it's going straight into the uefi fret not because we now have our backup image we need to boot the pc from our rescuezilla usb stick again and start rescuezilla once more this time we're going to select restore start by selecting the image location the source drive is connected directly to your computer and in my case it's the one terabyte usb drive once you've selected yours click on next and if you save the image in a subfolder like i did rather than directly on the root of the drive click on browse we then need to locate the image i put mine inside the my pi folder that i created and there it is windows 10 factory settings so i'll select that and click ok from there click next then we need to select the drive to restore which is your computer's internal drive or in my case the 120 gigabyte ssd then click next again as with when you created the backup image unless you know what you're doing and have a good reason for not choosing them leave all of the partitions selected make sure you leave overwrite partition tables selected as well then click on next to continue check over the configuration you've just chosen i can see that the source image is in the bite my pi folder on my external usb drive and that the destination drive is my 120 gigabyte ssd it's going to restore all of the partitions and recreate the original partition table so to do just that let's click next as this is going to wipe all of the data on the destination drive we need to confirm that we do indeed wish to proceed so click yes to do so just as when we created the backup image itself restoring from it will also take some time i'll pause the video once more and return when it's done marvelous as we can see the backup has successfully restored this time it took 5.1 minutes let's click on next to continue and once again we find ourselves back at rescue zilla's welcome screen now as the old expression goes the proof of the pudding is in the eating so let's see if the restore has actually worked first we need to shut down the computer then after removing both the external usb drive and the rescue zilla usb stick power your pc back on and look at that we're now back in business ready to set up our computer as though we'd only just taken it out of the box another good time to create a system image is once you have your pc set up exactly as you like it in some ways this is even more useful than the image of when your computer was brand new though i'd suggest you create an image of both of these states the reason i say that this second image is even more useful is because should disaster now strike you can easily return the pc to how it was when all was well without needing to reinstall your favorite programs and reconfigure the settings and appearance to demonstrate this i've got this windows 10 pc up and running and installed some of my favorite software on it you can see shortcuts to libreoffice vlc and on the desktop i've also changed the wallpaper and customized the start menu this time rather than an external usb drive we're going to create the image onto a network share so i'll shut down the computer connect my rescuezilla usb stick and power the pc back on we need to boot from the usb stick choose the language and start rescuezilla select backup from the welcome screen and choose the drive we want to image as before mine is the 120 gigabyte ssd for our purposes we want to keep all of the partitions selected but this time instead of having the destination drive connected directly to my computer we're going to pick shared over a network in order to connect to our network share we need to enter some details at a bare minimum you'll need to enter the server or share location this is in the format forward slash forward slash followed by the ip address of either the server or your nas then another forward slash and the name of your network share i've got an open media vault nas and the name of the share is omv share if anyone can connect to your network drive and add files to it this should be all you need to enter however if like mine you require a username and password to connect you need to enter them into the corresponding boxes with that done click on next if you're happy to create the image directly onto the network share you can click on next again but if you'd sooner do a bit of housekeeping you can create a subfolder to put it in to do this click on the little folder icon and give the folder a name then click create and now click on ok and you can see that it's going to create the image inside my new pc image folder let's click on next and now we can either leave this default name for our image or give it a more meaningful title double check that you've made the right selections and then we'll start the process depending on several factors not least of which is the speed of your network this may take a little longer than a directly connected backup image so it's definitely a good time to grab that all-important coffee with the process complete and our backup image saved successfully we can click on next and from there shut down the computer as with the local backup image if you're curious you can also take a look at the network one on windows i'll do this in file explorer i simply enter backslash backslash the ip address of my network attached storage backslash and the name of my network share which is omv share and press enter since my nas is password protected i need to enter my username and password and then click on ok you can see that my network share now has a pc image folder within it and if i double click that there's my windows 10 ready to go image as with the locally stored image again this is another folder containing all of the components that make up the backup image okay let's close out of there to restore the backup image we need to boot from our rescuezilla usb stick so this time click on restore the source drive is our server or nas so click on shared over a network enter the server or share location in the format shown on screen if your network share requires a username and password enter those as well then click on next to proceed if you saved your image directly onto the share it should appear in the highlighted area in which case make sure it's selected and click on next but if you placed it in a sub directory click on browse instead mine's in pc image so i'll single click to select it and then click on ok with the image highlighted click on next and now we need to select the destination drive which in my case is the 120 gigabyte ssd make sure that all of the partitions are selected as well as overwrite partition table double check that your configuration is correct and then click on next again and because this is going to overwrite the contents of our computer's internal drive we need to confirm that this is what we want to do right i'll pause the video once more and return upon completion we can see from the summary that everything's been successfully restored so if we click on next and shut down the computer we can try it out and make sure disconnect the rescue zilla usb stick from your pc and power it back on if we log in you can see that everything is just as we left it as though this configuration has been perfectly preserved in time so no matter what catastrophes lurk ahead we should always be able to return to this point which is precisely the reason we created an image in the first place so let's say something got messed up we'll delete a couple of the desktop shortcuts not exactly the end of the world but let's remove them from the recycle bin as well oh dear now we really are in trouble obviously i'm exaggerating but hopefully you get the idea the change would usually be something a lot more severe but regardless of the reason by performing the same steps we did earlier we can reset our computer back to a perfectly working state if we boot the computer from the rescuezilla usb stick there's one more option on the welcome screen this has the label image explorer you'll notice that it's also still in beta let's select it to take a closer look at what this is the idea is that we can select a previously created backup image so i'll browse for the one on my external usb drive that i created earlier and then ok that if i select it and click next in theory i can choose the partition where my data is stored which if there was any data on it would be this 60 gigabyte ntfs one remember this particular image was taken from a new windows installation so there won't be any personal data in there anyway but let's say that there was something that we wanted to extract the purpose of this image explorer tool is to enable us to mount our image in order to peruse the data within it you would do this by double clicking on the partition that contains the required data the problem currently is that as it tells us this operation will be unusably slow at this point in time certainly while this feature remained in beta i wouldn't advise trying to use it so i'll cancel out of there and then go back to the welcome screen while the ability to recover individual files from an image may be useful personally i don't consider it by any means essential my reasoning is that to me images are best treated as a recovery tool to restore the whole system should the doodoo hit the fan i certainly don't see them as a replacement for backing up your important data and i'd recommend that you treat these two areas as separate entities the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that rescuezilla's welcome screen is actually a closable window and the final area i'd like to draw your attention to in this video is what's lurking behind it when we boot into rescuezilla it not only loads the imaging tool but also a complete mini operating system as you can see this has several shortcuts on the desktop ar and r is a tool primarily designed to control multiple monitors if you have them this seems a little extravagant for a system recovery solution but there you have it we also have a built-in file manager if you'd like to have a poke around in there perhaps more useful is the firefox web browser if you only have a single pc and its usual operating system has become unusable you could connect to the internet and carry out some further research in here we have access to a terminal if you're feeling particularly adventurous and underneath that is g parted this could be very useful say for example you decide to dedicate an external usb drive to your system images and you'd like to make sure that it's set up correctly before doing so with the drive connected to your computer select it from the drop down list i'm going to go with my one terabyte hard disk right click on any of the partitions here there's only one to make sure that they're not mounted then click in the white space to close the menu and select device next choose create partition table it's important that you've selected the right drive as continuum will wipe the entire disk if your usb drive is 2 terabytes or smaller leave the partition type on ms dot but if it's larger than 2 terabytes change this to gpt then click on apply next click on the new partition icon leave all of the sizes on their defaults to create one single large partition the file system you choose will depend on what type of computer you're using for windows pcs i'd suggest going with ntfs you can give the drive a label to make it easier to identify i'll go with usb and when you've made your selections click on add to write all of our changes to the disk we need to click on the green tick and then providing you're happy to continue click on apply once it's complete you can close out of the program if you'd like to check your handiwork you should be able to see the drive in file manager obviously there's nothing on there yet but it's now ready to go rescuezilla also has a handy little text editor called mousepad if you'd like to make any note and then you can use the final desktop shortcut to relaunch the rescuezilla program on the bottom of the screen we have a taskbar and the little start menu that we've seen before besides being able to shut down from here we also have access to the programs supplied with the operating system and below that some system preferences on the bottom right of the taskbar we can control or mute the volume view our network settings and see the date and time and that in a nutshell is rescuezilla's desktop when faced with an unusable pc an added bonus of having a usb stick with rescuezilla on it is potentially being able to recover your data even if you haven't created an image containing it provided the storage isn't encrypted you may be able to retrieve files and folders from it to do this open file manager and select your computer's internal drive in the case of windows navigate to the users folder then into the name of your account and because you're now inside the home directory you should see your files and folders let's say i want to recover everything inside the music directory if i right click on it and choose copy and then connect a second usb stick to my computer i can select that and paste the music folder into it and if there had been any on it this would have rescued my tunes from the ailing computer while this has nothing to do with imaging it shows another benefit of keeping rescue zilla available on one of your flash drives and that brings us to the end of this video whether you're running a windows mac or linux computer i hope you can see the benefits of making use of a system imaging tool obviously you can create an image at any point just bear in mind that even with rescuezilla's built-in compression the more data you have on your computer the larger the image will be that's why it's a good idea to take an image when you first purchase a new computer and again when you've got it all set up and running just how you like it and with the free and open source rescuezilla you now have an easy to use tool for the job as always if you enjoyed this video please like and subscribe and if you'd like to be notified when i post the next one just click the bell icon thanks for watching and until next time take care [Music] you

Channel: Byte My Pi

Views: 13,271

Keywords: rescuezilla, clonezilla, imaging, images, system image, gzip, disk imaging, disk image, redo rescue, snapshot, backup, restore

Id: 20WpVButTW8

Length: 25min 57sec (1557 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021