My dear lemmings,
I discovered Clonezilla a while ago and it still is my main tool to backup and restore the partitions I care about on my computers.
I cannot help but wonder if there are now better, more efficient alternatives or is it still a solid choice? There's nothing wrong with it, I'm just curious about others' practices and habits — and if there was newer tools or solutions available.
Thank you for your feedback, and keep your drives safe!
The fact that Linux lacks a decent system-level backup tool with a GUI is kind of a mind boggler for me. The best one I've found which gets close to this is timeshift. File-level backups can't restore your whole system state and users shouldn't be expected to remember or manually export their package lists and god knows what else. I have subsisted on file-only backups but it's really not great as a solution. Disks fail, and when they do, you inevitably have to reinstall the entire OS. It's a mess. RAID1 could theoretically prevent this, but no distro makes it easy to boot from a RAID1 setup.
Backing up the entire filesystem is not a technically complex thing, there are plenty of command-line tools to do this and some filesystems even support this concept via snapshots etc. But this has yet to be put into a useful practice for end users.