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How can I can clone or ghost my Ubuntu System drive to restore it to a bigger HD? Something like Norton Ghost does with NTFS or FAT on Windows.

brasofilo
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user3737
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3 Answers3

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Clonezilla is the closest free option to Ghost.

The underlying tools it uses, partimage and ntfsclone, understand the underlying filesystem. So unlike a simple low-level copy (dd) which copies all bytes, they only copy the used space on the filesystem and its metadata. This results in a much smaller disk image.

Evan
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  • Do you mean like. If i have 40GB disk, and my system is using 10GB and 30GB is free. while using dd it will write 40GB to given usb/dvd/cd? Or it will only write 10GB? –  Nov 16 '11 at 16:21
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If you want to move your data to a new harddrive, the Simple Backup Suite can make it very easy for you. Just backup your data, then install Ubuntu onto the new hard-drive and restore from your backup.

If what you really want is a perfect transfer of data from your old harddrive to your new one, you can use the "dd" command-line tool to easily transfer the data. There's a great discussion of this technique on Server Fault.

Community
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Ryan Prior
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  • The stability and reliability of this package is questionable. As of 6/14/2011 there were 48 open bugs and little sign of development. A second bug reporting site shows signs of development. (signs are dead in the second site as well) – brasofilo Nov 18 '13 at 16:40
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I was half way through a response when I found this page mirror.

The classical unix way is a tool called "dd". The page explains how to use it.

brasofilo
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Jeremy
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  • I just took a look at the SimpleBackupSuite that Ryan mentioned, it looks pretty awesome actually. – Jeremy Oct 13 '10 at 12:25