Roland Waddilove shows how Clonezilla
can save a complete image of your hard disk to a USB disk or an NAS drive
Disk drives contain a lot of valuable
information such as photographs, music, documents, videos, and various files
and other information. Yet some people have no backup at all and others have
inadequate backups. Most people are just too trusting of today's technology and
they assume that their computers will last forever and will never go wrong.
That's simply not true. Like all machines, they can fail, and mechanical
faults, lightning strikes, floods and other disasters can all cause disk drives
to stop working.
the
Backup Using Clonezilla
There are countless utilities for backing
up the files on a hard disk, which is what many people do. They store their
documents, photos and other files on a USB disk drive, online storage, CD and
DVD-Rs and so on. However, if you have to replace the disk drive with a new
one, how are you going to boot it if there's no operating system on it? Windows
discs aren't supplied with PCs these days and even if you had one, you would
still lose all your software, some of which might be expensive.
File backups are useful, of course, but to
really protect your PC, a complete disk backup is required. A mirror image or
clone of the disk contents stored on another disk drive kept elsewhere is the
ideal solution. In the event of a serious problem, the cloned disk could be
copied back to the same disk after formatting it or to a new drive unit after a
total failure.
Clonezilla is a free, open-source program
that can copy a disk drive for backup purposes. It can copy one disk to another
disk, which is useful if you're replacing a drive, or it can copy a disk and
store it as an image file on another disk, such as a USB drive. A really
interesting feature is the ability to store the disk image on an NAS drive on
your home or office network. If you have a large-capacity NAS drive, it would
be possible to back up all your PCs to it. In the event of a disk problem or
complete failure, the disk image can be copied back to the drive and everything
is restored exactly as it was when the backup was made.
Another useful feature of Clonezilla is
that it supports a variety of disk formats, including Windows and Linux, so no
matter what you use, Clonezilla can back it up over the network to a NAS drive
or locally to a USB drive. Not only will it back up Windows and Linux disks, it
will create and store an image of a dual-booting Windows and Linux system that
uses Grub to select the OS on start-up. Restore the image and you have your
Windows and Linux partitions and Grub all working exactly as before. Few backup
tools do that.
Clonezilla is actually based on Linux and
it's supplied as an .iso disc image. Download the Clonezilla live .iso from
cloneziila.org and double-click the file to write it to a CD-R. If your PC does
not recognise .iso files, then install something like CDBurnerXP
(cdburnerxp.se/en/home).
1. Prepare For Backup
Before you run Clonezilla, there are some
tasks that need to be performed on the PC, the first of which is to check your
hard disk for errors. Backing up a disk drive when it has errors on it could
potentially lead to problems, and it's possible that files may be corrupted or
missed on backup or restore operations. Click 'Start', 'Computer' and then
right-click your hard disk. Select 'Properties' and click 'Check now' on the
'Tools' tab. The disk can't be checked while Windows is running, so you'll need
to restart the computer.
If you're backing up to a USB disk drive,
you should check it for errors in the same way. If you intend to back up to a
NAS drive, though, you need to find out its IP address on the network. You
won't be able to refer to it by name, so the way to select the NAS drive as the
backup destination is to enter its IP address. There are several ways of
discovering it, but the software that came with the drive should be able to
tell you. For example, my drive comes with NASNavigator, and clicking the icon
at the right side of the taskbar opens a window and displays the NAS drive. It
shows the device name, IP address, IP address of the router (called the
gateway), the subnet mask, and the Windows workgroup. Make a note of all this
information -you'll need it.
If your NAS drive software isn't so
helpful, Click 'Start', 'Computer' and then 'Network' in the left panel in
Windows 7. The NAS drive will probably show up as a media device. Right-click
it and select 'Properties' to see some useful information. Logging on to the
NAS drive as an administrator and exploring the configuration settings will
also reveal its IP address and other details.
Your PC will need to boot from the
Clonezilla CD. This should not be a problem for most people, because PCs are
commonly set up to check the CD/DVD-ROM drive for boot discs before starting
from your hard disk. It will either boot straight up from the disc or display a
message for five seconds or so, such as 'Press a key to boot from CD.' If you
don't, then a normal hard disk boot up is assumed.
If your PC doesn't boot from the CD, you
will need to enter the BIOS setup and set the boot option. Switch on the PC and
after a second or two, press the F1, Del or whatever key your PC requires to
get into the BIOS setup. Go through the screens of settings and look for
something like Boot Device or Boot Order. Set it to CD/DVD-ROM drive first and
your hard disk second.
Before
running Clonezilla, find out your NAS drive's IP address and workgroup
