Installing partclone

[ionmich]

Installed but won’t start.

[ion@Desk ~]$ sudo pacman -S partclone
warning: partclone-0.3.50-2 is up to date -- reinstalling
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Package (1)      Old Version  New Version  Net Change

extra/partclone  0.3.50-2     0.3.50-2       0.00 MiB

Total Installed Size:  1.81 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:      0.00 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] 
(1/1) checking keys in keyring                             [--------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) checking package integrity                           [--------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                                [--------------------------------] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                          [--------------------------------] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) reinstalling partclone                               [--------------------------------] 100%
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/2) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
(2/2) Checking which packages need to be rebuilt
[ion@Desk ~]$ sudo partclone
sudo: partclone: command not found
[ion@Desk ~]$ 

[Bink]

Try:

partclone.info

Then using it, you’d need to use partclone.[fstype], like partclone.ext4 or partclone.btrfs.

See details here:

Partclone - Usage

[ionmich]

I read through the instructions, but as I understand them if I want to do a drive to drive clone I would need a third drive to save the image file unless I reboot. I think I will stay with using dd. Slower but it has always worked. Thanks for the assistance.

[ajgringo619]

partclone can save drives as restorable image files; I do this all the time for long-term system backups. You can also use clonezilla, which is a front-end to partclone that can copy drive-to-drive directly.

While dd does work, its image files are the exact same size as the partition. while partclone images are never bigger than the partition’s actual used space.

[Bedna]

@ajgringo619

partclone can save drives as restorable image files; I do this all the time for long-term system backups.

Or more specifically: (ext4 and sda1 in this example, -d is debug and is optional)

# create clone image
sudo partclone.ext4 -c -d -s /dev/sda1 -o /path/to/backup.img

# restore img to a partition
sudo partclone.restore -d -s /path/to/backup.img -o /dev/sda1

There are great examples in the documentation, clone & restore

@ajgringo619 can you also do this directly on a “drive”, not only partitions?
Like:

sudo partclone.dd -d -s /dev/sda -o /path/to/backup.img

I can only see partitions being mentioned, not full devices (drives) and have never tried.

[Nyan]

@ajgringo619

While dd does work, its image files are the exact same size as the partition. while partclone images are never bigger than the partition’s actual used space.

DD can DD to gzip bzip or zstd. In which case you get image usually smaller than used partition size.