To back up or restore a hard drive using Clonezilla, you must boot your computer from a bootable Clonezilla USB drive and interact with its text-based wizard to capture or apply a full disk image. Clonezilla is a powerful, free, open-source tool that works regardless of your operating system (Windows, Mac, or Linux).
The step-by-step process details how to handle preparation, backing up, and restoring. Phase 1: Preparation & Creating Bootable Media
Before launching the software, you must create a live bootable media device.
Download Clonezilla: Visit the Clonezilla Downloads Page. Select amd64 as the CPU architecture and iso as the file type to get the latest stable release.
Flash to USB: Insert an empty USB drive (at least 1 GB). Use a flashing utility like Rufus (Windows) or BalenaEtcher (Mac/Linux) to write the downloaded .iso file to the drive.
Prepare Storage: Ensure you have an external hard drive connected with enough free space to hold the backup image of your internal drive.
Boot into Clonezilla: Restart your PC. Repeatedly press your motherboard’s boot menu key (usually F12, F11, F8, or Esc) and select your Clonezilla USB drive.
Initial Setup: Choose the default Clonezilla live (VGA 800×600) option. Select your preferred language, and choose Don’t touch keymap. Select Start Clonezilla. Phase 2: How to Back Up Your Hard Drive (Device-Image)
This process copies your entire physical drive into a compressed folder (image) stored on your external drive. Clonezilla: disk cloning, but it’s easier than dd
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