Rescuezilla a GUI version of CloneZilla

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Disk imaging for all

Rescuezilla is an easy-to-use disk imaging application that’s fully compatible with Clonezilla — the industry-standard trusted by tens of millions.

Disk imaging makes a backup of your computer’s hard drive which is managed as files stored on an external hard drive. If your hard drive fails, you can restore your disk image and within a few minutes all your documents and settings will be restored to the exact same state they were in when the last snapshot was taken.

Rescuezilla lets you perform backup, restore and recovery actions, even if you aren’t able to boot into your regular operating system. It does not matter if you use Windows, Mac or Linux. It doesn’t matter if you can’t even login. Download and write the ISO to a USB stick, and reboot your machine. Your computer will load a complete mini operating system with a point-and-click user interface into your computer’s memory without writing any information to your hard drive.

Rescuezilla is a fork of Redo Backup and Recovery (now called Redo Rescue) after it had been abandoned for 7 years.

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rodcallen

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I certainly won’t complain about having more options for an important task like backups, especially when they are open source (I checked and it is licensed under GPL v3, which is unusually well hidden compared with other FOSS projects), but this product is missing one important thing that many users have come to expect from backup software, and that’s the ability to make backups from within the system that is being backed up.

Back in the early days of Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image (V6 was the first one I used), it was generally understood by the people I talked to that all backups were done with the system offline… after all, how could you back up a system that is in use and whose files are changing even as the backup is trying to create a fixed-in-time snapshot?

That problem is a thing of the past, though, and now imaging backup programs that can work from disks that are being backed up are the standard, with Macrium Reflect, Acronis True Image, Aomei Backupper, and many others having this ability on the Windows side. On Linux, I am only aware of one that’s available to consumers, and that’s Veeam (agent).

Of course, there are snapshotting file systems like Btrfs that can do this natively, and Fedora moved to make that standard on the latest release (v33)… but for the people who use Ext4 volumes, Veeam seems to be the only game in town, aside from enterprise-priced options like whatever Acronis calls their Linux program.

Veeam is, like the Linux backup from Acronis, aimed at enterprise customers, but the two companies have very different approaches to those of us who use Linux personally. Veeam is free for individuals to use, since we’re not really on Veeam’s radar anyway, while to Acronis, not being on the radar apparently means we don’t exist, or we might as well not, and there is no version of their software that won’t cost you an arm and a leg because of enterprise licensing. There is no True Image (a consumer-oriented product) for Linux!

I’d buy a full-featured equivalent of True Image in a heartbeat if it existed. Veeam is fantastic, and I am very glad to have it, but it lacks a true GUI (no big deal to me, but it gives others problems) and inexplicably limits consumers (and even its lower tier enterprise customers) to a single backup profile (they call it a ‘job’), which is a pain when I have two or more backup locations (my backup server on the LAN and external hard drives plugged into the unit itself). I’d love to see Veeam or another product fix that problem, and I’d pay for it too, but not at enterprise licensing levels!

Prior to Veeam, I used to boot to a Macrium rescue USB drive and create the backup from there. Reflect was (and is) capable of imaging Linux volumes with no problem, as are many or most Windows backup programs, and it worked well on the occasions I used it in a restore operation. It was just so inconvenient to have to have the PC offline while it was backing up… something I had not had to deal with for years in the Windows world.

If you don’t mind closed source software, there are already a lot of choices for USB bootable backup programs that can be used to back up and restore Linux volumes (as well as Windows volumes, of course) from the USB live session. If you use Windows, you also have the advantage of being able to run the backup operation from there while you use the PC (as you do in Linux if you use Veeam, and I would presume there are several similar options in MacOS too).

It would be nice if this project eventually evolved to being able to do live backups, but it seems to be beyond the scope and intent of what Rescuezilla is about.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
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Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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