Rescuezilla, a Tool That Simplifies System Backup and Restore
Rescuezilla is a tool and Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that simplifies the backup, cloning, and restoration of operating system images, and can also verify existing ones. Its main purpose is to make the tools provided by Clonezilla more accessible — tools that are powerful but can be difficult and rough to use for less experienced users. That is where Rescuezilla comes in, aiming to ease things by providing a simple graphical interface that brings Clonezilla’s capabilities closer to commercial solutions like Acronis True Image and Macrium Reflect.
Rescuezilla was born as a fork of Redo Backup and Recovery, can be booted from a USB drive on x86-based PCs and Macs (Intel and AMD), and has been “carefully developed” to be fully interoperable with Clonezilla — meaning Rescuezilla can restore backups made with Clonezilla and vice versa.
Focusing on the present, Rescuezilla 2.5 was recently released with the primary goal of improving hardware support, and as such has added Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, and Ubuntu 23.04-based images, complementing the already existing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS images. In addition to the system images based on various Ubuntu versions, a Deb package providing the tool has also been included.
The second major new feature in Rescuezilla 2.5 is the introduction of an experimental command-line interface (CLI) that currently only supports images created with Clonezilla and Rescuezilla, and covers backup, verification, restore, and cloning operations. The developers emphasize that the CLI is in an unstable phase, so its use in production environments is not recommended.
The partclone tool has been updated from version 0.3.20 to 0.3.27, Rescuezilla itself has been integrated into the automated integration test suite scripts to allow faster iteration with the project, and it is now possible to continue scanning images after an error, so a permission-denied error encountered in irrelevant folders will no longer block the image listing.
There is more: a bug that caused RAID device backups to fail via the Linux md driver when they contained MBR partition tables has been fixed; the hashdeep package is now installed as a temporary command-line workaround for a specific niche of users until Rescuezilla’s interface handles it properly; bugs in restore and cloning operations that appeared when Rescuezilla 2.4.2 was used in Portuguese have been corrected; and laptops are now prevented from entering sleep mode when the lid is closed.
Those are the main highlights of Rescuezilla 2.5. Anyone who wants the full details can find them in the release announcement published on the project’s GitHub repository, where the ISO images and the Deb package are also available for download.
