I just used Clonezilla for the first time today. It seemed to go well, but the resulting image is smaller than I expected.
The parition that I wanted to clone has about 21GB of space used on it, yet the image is only about 12GB. Is this normal? Shouldn't the image be about the same size as the space used on the partition?
I have 3 partitions on my drive. A Windows partition, an Ubuntu partition and a storage partition.
This is the partition that I tried to clone , sda5 (Ubuntu partition).
This is the details of the image that was created by Clonezilla:
Here is some info on all my partitions:
What's going on here? Why is my image smaller than the space consumed on the partition? I would really appreciate some help.
Thanks!
Best Answer
Correct, Clonezilla used gzip compression and file splitting when storing the image.
You can check this with the
file
command. That should tell you if it really is a gzip compressed file or something else.Reducing the file size by half is a typical result when using gzip. Some other compression tools are more efficient but slower (xz, lzma) or a bit less efficient but much faster than gzip (lzop, lz4). And there is also zstd.
Knowing the compression used on the files, you could decompress the image and loop mount with
mount
to check if the filesystem is still consistent. The following command can be used to decompress the image:Use the equivalent program to
gzip
and refer to the corresponding man page iffile
returned something else than gzip.