After several instances of my Ubuntu 18.04 crashing unrecoverably and not booting I decided to backup my data/ settings/ themes etc. I wanted to boot and install my current system from a USB stick just as I installed fresh Ubuntu 18.04. The internet suggests using Clonezilla to create an iso image of my drive and store it in the USB flash drive. My current system with all of its themes, configurations, settings and files takes up about 13Gb of my 252 Gb SSD drive(Acer Swift 3, dev/sda2). If I understand it correctly, Clonezilla copies the whole system, including unused space to the USB stick. The only problem is that my USB stick is only 16Gb. Finally The Question: Is there any way to clone only the used part onto the USB stick? Or should I have to buy 512GB USB stick?
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1Does this answer your question? How do I move (copy) my entire Ubuntu system to a different hard disk? – graham Apr 11 '20 at 13:24
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2Does this answer your question? How would I use tar for full backup and restore with system on SSD and home on HDD? – mikewhatever Apr 11 '20 at 13:24
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I have a recovery partition that is at the end of my drive 30GB that I use to back up to with clonezilla, which is on a bootable USB stick.
If I'm about to start anything that I've never tried before, I back up my EFI, ROOT and HOME partitions. Clonezilla does a clone of your partition excluding the spaces, so it will clone from 200GB of partitions down to a 6GB backup.
This allows you to become a LOT more adventurous as there is always a safety net.
Mark Schafer
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Concur, Clonezilla only copies used space. It is picky, though, when you go to restore - the target partition must be as large or larger than the source partition was (including unused space). Supposedly there's a way to work around that, but I have never gotten it to work. – Organic Marble Apr 19 '20 at 00:16