I have my ubuntu 14.04 system in one partition (I do not have an extra partition for home) while I have date in another partition. I regularly backup data using a backup tool (areca) but I was wondering how to backup my system (including apps) so I started looking for imaging tools, things like dd, tar, or clonezilla. But I found the imaging feature of disks and it this works, it seems pretty neat to me. boot with ubuntu image, make an image of the partition and in case of big failure, boot again with ubuntu image and restore the image. To me that sounds like clonezilla but I would like to know if this sounds correct and if there's anyone out there that has used it. I have found this Is the create disk image in the disks utility like clonezilla?, but it is not clear to me from the answer how is that imaging a partition with disks utility is any different from using clonezilla.
Any help would be appreciated.
Regards,
Javier
Best Answer
Clonezilla is smart enough to recognize most filesystems and skip the free space, reducing the size of the image. The disks utility is not so smart and just copies everything. Also clonezilla can further compress the image reducing its size even more. Due to the lack of these features, the gnome disk utility's current image support isn't practically usable.