Cloning your Hard Disk (HDD, SSD, NVME, …) — Clonezilla

All you need

1. Download Clonezilla

• Goes to CloneZilla download section: https://clonezilla.org/downloads/download.php?branch=stable
• Download it as a .zip file

2. Prepare the USB Pendrive

• Create at least a 500 MB partition on your USB flash drive and format it with a FAT16/FAT32 file system.
• Extract all the contents of the zip clonezila .zip file to the FAT16/FAT32 partition on your USB flash drive. Make sure you have extracted all the directories and files, including the “.disk”.

unzip clonezilla-live-3.1.0-22-amd64.zip -d /media/usb/

3. Source disk

• Identify your source disk, the disk that will be cloned, that contains all your partitions and data files

4. Destination disk

• Identify the destionation disk, the disk that will receive the cloned data. All previous data will be wipe out from this disk during the process

5. Boot the Live USB

• Power off the PC
• Stick the USB pendrive on it
• Power on PC
• Press F12 to open the boot menu
• And select to boot with USB drive

6. Start Clonezilla

• Select Default Settings, VGA 800x600
• Select To RAM
• Select the language English
• Select the default Keyboard US
• Start Clonezilla

7. Disk to Disk clone Setup

• Select device-to-device option
• Select Beginner
• Select disk_to_local_disk
• Select the source disk (the one identified at step 3)
• Select the destination disk (the one identified at step 4) — ALL DATA WILL BE OVERWRITED AT THE DESTINATION DISK
• Select to skip the file system check
• Select choose to choose what to do at the end of the cloning process

8. Disk to Disk clone Start

• Press ENTER to continue and START the clone process
• Confirm the ask question to make sure the correct destination disk was selected, and all partitions and data on it will be overwrited!
• Confirm again that the correct destination disk was selected — you were warning!
• Sit and wait…

9. Clonning process

• Clonezilla will create a image from the source
• Clonezilla will create a partition table at the destination disk
• Clonezilla will copy which partition from source disk to the destination disk
• Clone process ends!

10. Finsih

• Clonezilla will ask you what to do: shutdown, reboot or enter comand line or rerun clonezilla (goes to step 6 again)
• Select shutdown!

11. Verify destination disk

• Unplug the USB pendrive
• Unplug the source disk (DO NOT BOOT WITH BOTH DISK AT SAME TIME — They have same UUID so the booting OS might mount the wrong file system.)
• Plug the destination disk
• Power up PC
• Press F12 to open the boot menu
• And select to boot with destination disk
• System will boot at the destionation disk, like it was the source disk!

12. Notes

• This process is usefull when you need to move your OS from an old disk to a new one;
• If you just want to save a backup, use the disk-to-image option in step 7 and it will create a backup .img image file.

Clonezilla logo

More information about Clonezilla here: https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php