Partclone is a partition clone and restore tool. It provides utilities to back up and restore partitions and is designed for higher compatibility of the
file system
In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one lar ...
library. It is developed by the
NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan.
It is the default backup application in
Clonezilla
Clonezilla is a suite of open source drive cloning, drive imaging and system deployment utilities used to simplify deployment and maintenance of a group of computers. Clonezilla Server Edition uses multicast technologies to deploy a single imag ...
,
FOG from version 1.00 and
Redo Backup and Recovery
Redo Rescue, formerly Redo Backup and Recovery, is a free backup and disaster recovery software. It runs from a bootable Linux CD image, features a GUI that is a front end to the Partclone command line utility, and is capable of bare-metal backu ...
which is simply a front end to partclone.
It supports many file systems and has good performance, as it skips portions of the file system marked as free space.
Utilities
Partclone currently supports the following filesystems:
ext2
The ext2 or second extended file system is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by French software developer Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed according to the same p ...
,
ext3
ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions. Stephen Tweedie first revealed that he was working on exten ...
,
ext4
ext4 (fourth extended filesystem) is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3.
ext4 was initially a series of backward-compatible extensions to ext3, many of them originally developed by Cluster File Systems fo ...
,
hfs+
HFS Plus or HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Extended) is a journaling file system developed by Apple Inc. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8. ...
,
reiserfs
ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaling file system initially designed and implemented by a team at Namesys led by Hans Reiser and licensed under GPLv2. Introduced in version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel, it was the first journaling file syst ...
,
reiser4,
btrfs
Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or simply by spelling it out) is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (not to be confused ...
,
vmfs(v3, v5),
xfs
XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as ...
,
jfs,
ufs,
ntfs
New Technology File System (NTFS) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It superseded File Allocation Table (FAT) as the preferred f ...
,
fat(12/16/32), and
exFAT
exFAT (Extensible File Allocation Table) is a file system introduced by Microsoft in 2006 and optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards. exFAT was proprietary until 28 August 2019, when Microsoft published its specificat ...
.
To run partclone for a particular filesystem, one uses the command 'partclone.
', in a similar manner to the mkfs
In computer operating systems, mkfs is a command used to format a block storage device with a specific file system. The command is part of Unix and Unix-like operating systems. In Unix, a block storage device must be formatted with a file system ...
command
* partclone.btrfs
* partclone.ext2, partclone.ext3, partclone.ext4
* partclone.fat32, partclone.fat12, partclone.fat16
* partclone.ntfs
* partclone.exFAT
* partclone.hfsp
* partclone.jfs
* partclone.reiserfs
* partclone.reiser4
* partclone.ufs (support SU+J)
* partclone.vmfs (v3)
* partclone.vmfs5 (for vmfs v5)
* partclone.xfs
Features
Partclone is a partition image tool which attempts to only back up used data blocks. It's written in C and focuses on cloning filesystems, as opposed to cloning disks. The basic features are:
* clone partition to image file
* restore image file to partition
* restore image file to raw file as loop device
* duplicate partition on the fly
* create domain file for ddrescue
* crc32 support
* pipe support (restore from stdin , clone to stdout)
* text mode , quiet mode
* Ncurses Text interface
* rescue support
* transfer rate, elapsed time calculating
* support raw clone (like dd)
* partclone.chkimg check image made by partclone
See also
* List of disk cloning software
* FOG Project
References
External links
* {{Official website, http://www.partclone.org/
Disk images
Free backup software
Backup software