In the next article we are going to take a look at Partclone. This is one partition cloning and restoration tool. It will provide us with utilities to make backup copies and restore partitions. It is designed for greater file system library compatibility. It has been developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan.
Partclone is a free and open source tool to create and clone partition images. This program is presented to us by the Clonezilla developers. In fact, this is one of the tools on which it is based Clonezilla. Partclone supports many file systems and performs well, skipping parts of the file system marked as free space.
The tool provides users with everything they need to backup and restore used partition blocks. It also offers high compatibility with various file systems thanks to its ability to use existing libraries such as e2fslibs to read and write partitions.
The goal of Partclone is to support most of the major file systems in the world. The program is an image engine, not only for save the file system to an image or restore an image to a partition, but also for clone devices.
It also supports pipe, stdin, and stdout, which is useful for the advanced administrator with whom to create special feature scripts through the partclone utilities. Rescue mode Partclone will try to skip bad blocks and backing up all healthy blocks for partitions. The ddrescue program is another good solution to save a damaged disk.
General features of Partclone
- Is Freeware. Partclone is free for everyone to download and use. It is an open source program. It was released under the GNU GPL license and is open to contribution in GitHub.
- It is a tool multi platform. It is available for Gnu / Linux, Windows and MAC.
- Provide users with a page of online documentation from where we can see the help documents and follow your problems with GitHub.
- We may also have a online user manual for beginners and professionals.
- The program us offers rescue support. It will offer us the possibility of clone partitions to image files. It will also allow us restore image files to partitions o duplicate partitions quickly.
- During operations it will show us the Transfer speed and the elapsed time.
- Perhaps his best virtue is variety of formats supported, they include: ext2, ext3, ext4, hfs +, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, vmfs3, vmfs5, xfs, jfs, ufs, ntfs, fat (12/16/32), exfat, f2fs and nilfs.
- It also has a lot of available programs that are included: partclone.ext2 (ext3 and ext4), partclone.ntfs, partclone.exfat, partclone.hfsp y partclone.vmfs (v3 and v5), among others.
Install Partclone
To install this tool in our Ubuntu, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write the following command in it:
sudo apt install partclone
Use Partclone
First of all I want to clarify that for work on partitionsThese they cannot be mounted, so we must proceed to disassemble them to carry out any action on them.
We will also need to know the location of the partitions. For this we can use fdisk. This will show us a list of the partitions of our equipment. In the terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) we will write:
sudo fdisk -l
We can clone a partition to an image writing something similar to:
partclone.ntfs -d -c -s /dev/sda2 -o sda2.img
If we want restore an image to partition, we will only need to write something like:
partclone.ntfs -d -r -s sda2.img -o /dev/sda2
We can duplicate a partition:
partclone.ext4 -d -b -s /dev/sda5 -o /dev/sdb5
If we want get information from an image, we will only have to write:
partclone.info -s sda2.img
We can also perform a check on a created image typing in the terminal:
partclone.chkimg -s sda2.img
We can get more information about this tool using the help that the man command can contribute to us.
man partclone
Uninstall Partclone
To eliminate this program from our system, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and write:
sudo apt remove partclone && sudo apt autoremove
There are many more features and functionalities included in this program. You can see them in the project website.