Clonezilla

Tips

When cloning filesystems, clonezilla is good at only storing the occupied blocks of each partition’s filesystem. If you might ever need to restore to a smaller disk, spend the up front time to:

1. Boot to a Live Disk

2. Figure out how much space is actually in use:

   df -h
   

3. Resize the filesystem close to that number (not so close that the machine is unusable from no free space)

   resize2fs /dev/sda3 20G
   

4. Resize the corresponding partition to match the new size

   fdisk /dev/sda
   

   Delete partition 3 in this case, and create a new partition 3 with the the default starting sector, and +20G to match the above filesystem size.

5. Create the clonezilla disk as usual. This allows the last partition to be grown and can often be done online.