Is Clonezilla a good option for a daily batch-file-based backup of a Windows XP PC?

Question

Having just been through the process of rebuilding a Windows XP desktop machine when the disk died, I'm anxious to make it a lot less painful. I didn't lose any data, but reinstalling everything took ages.

Clonezilla seems to be a highly mentioned free backup tool. How easy would it be to implement the following:

• a nightly unattended backup of the desktop's disk image to another network machine (or a second drive in the machine), hopefully with compression.
• restore from that image using USB boot media.

so that if I come in to work and find the hard drive has tanked, it is just a matter of replacing the dead drive with a new one, booting from the USB stick, choosing the image to restore, and then finding something else to do for an hour or two. When it is finished I would hopefully be back to where I was.

Answer 1

You could use Clonezilla for this.

David Bauer provides a PDF, "Clonezilla fully unattended," here for the automated backup.

I haven't tried the Bauer instructions. They look rather like overkill for my purposes. I find that I can boot Clonezilla and setup a backup manually in a couple minutes which will then run unattended.

Restoring an image using Clonezilla on a USB stick is easy enough, once you're familiar with the drill. (I suggest you practice cloning an image and restoring it a few times beforehand so you feel comfortable with the process before relying on it.)

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However, given the multi-terabyte sizes of hard disks these days, I do wonder about cloning an entire disk every night.

My solution is to break my hard disk into two partitions -- a small partiton (~50GB) where my OS and apps live, and the rest of the hard drive for data.

I use Clonezilla to create an image of my system partition. I back up my data regularly using conventional approaches. I only use CZ to create a new system image if I've made some important changes to the system.

If my hard drive goes bad or my system becomes questionable, I restore the system partition with Clonezilla. Then I update my system (Java, Adobe Flash, anti-virus etc.) as necessary. If the data partition is down, I also restore the data according to my backup scheme.

This is pretty fast and painless. Restoring the system partition only takes about ten minutes. Plus I always have a clean image of my system available.