Cloning

Andrew Young

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I am going to install Linux Mint 19.1 cinnamon 64 bit on an external 5 TB Seagate backup plus hard drive. I am going to use only 2-3 TBs for Linux leaving the rest blank. Can I clone only the 2-3 TB linux installation so that I can restore to a 2-3 TB hard drive?

What would be the best cloning software to use?
 


G'day Andrew and welcome to linux.org :)

If you want a purely cloning solution, then it is hard to go past Steven Shiau's Clonezilla - https://clonezilla.org/ ... it is cross-platform so works with Windows too.

Read the front page and see if it meets your needs, Download is at the left side. You would burn it to a disk or USB stick, then modify your Setup to boot from the medium first over hard drive, and go from there.

You can choose between options of disk to disk, partition to disk, partition to partition, and disk to partition. You can also choose whether to generate a full clone, or to generate an image, which will be smaller.

The full clone operation is a low-level, sector by sector, operation, so it will copy all consumed space, as well as unallocated or empty space. So if your source drive is 500GB of which only 50GB is Linux used space, then you want a target area of say 502GB to allow for a little overhead by Clonezilla.

If you want an alternative that will allow you to move your Linux lock stock & barrel from Point A to Point B (drive or partitions), AND to have a functionality such as Windows Restore

... then you need go no further than Timeshift, which comes installed on your Linux Mint 19.1. For more information on Timeshift, you can read my Tute here

https://www.linux.org/threads/timeshift-similar-solutions-safeguard-recover-your-linux.15241/

or Linux Lite Distribution have a good little Tute in their Manual

https://www.linuxliteos.com/manual/tutorials.html#timeshift

Cheers

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 

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