Acronis true image similar programs. Backup: creating a partition image - CloneZilla. Removing unnecessary sections

They edit the system configuration files, after which the system crashes or does not work correctly. It also happens that it is problematic for teams to restore the system, and it is troublesome for users. And reinstalling Linux OS takes a lot of time. IN Windows there are such programs, for example, Acronis but unfortunately these programs are not free. After searching in Internet discovered a wonderful program similar to Acronis, this program is called PING (Partimage Is Not Ghost).

Download ISO the image can be here:

Program PING is designed to duplicate and restore entire systems via a network or removable media (for example, CD, DVD or other storage devices).

Attention! Found that the program does not work with the file system Ext4 .

So you downloaded ISO image and burned it to disk.

Create an image

Now let's look at creating a copy of your system step by step.

Install the disk and restart your computer. Naturally, in BIOS you should be primary CD or DVD disk.

Program PING is loaded.

Push Enterto get started.

In the next window we read the warning. The essence of this warning is that if you decide to restore hDD from the image, then all data containing on this computer may be lost forever during the recovery process. You can still interrupt this process.

Push Enterto continue our process.

In the next window, you must select the action of the program after the end of the image creation process:
Get a shell (root) - login to the shell (root);
Reboot the system - reboot the system;
Shutdown - turn off.

We choose an item cursor keys and press Enter.

In the next window, you have to choose where you want to save the image or take an image for recovery. Two options are considered here, local and network.

In this article, we will consider creating a local image, which means we choose and click Enter.

In the next window that opens, you can see all the available sections.
Use the cursor keys to select the partition that we want to backup. The selection is made with a space.
We press Enter.

In the next window, select the name of the directory, where to save, we chose "\\" (slash without quotes).

In the next window, in the list of available images for recovery, select the item and click Enter.

In the next window, enter any directory name. A directory with this name will be created, and it will already contain the backup files. In this case, we named it copy.

# and click Enter.

In the next window, we choose how to compress or not compress our image, here act arbitrarily at your discretion. IN this example we chose compression gzip ... It should be noted that saving without compression, i.e. item selection no compression , will significantly speed up the image creation process, but will increase the size, which means it will take up more space on your hard disk or other media. Push Enter.

Here we choose and click Enter.

In the next window, select the item # and click Enter.

Now you will have to wait a few minutes while the program creates a backup (image) of your partition.

Recovering data from an image

Now let's look at restoring your system from a backup step by step.

Insert CD or DVD disk and restart your computer.
Program PING is loaded.

We wait. Push Enterto get started.

We read the warning and click Enterto proceed further.

A free program for managing logical partitions of a hard disk.

Earlier when capacity hard drives was measured in megabytes, to accumulate some decent space, several drives had to be connected to the computer.

The operating system recognized them and named them alternately with letters of the Latin alphabet. Everything was simple: how many hard drives cost - so many drive letters are displayed.

However, with the advent of high-capacity media, the situation began to change dramatically. Now almost every modern PC has only one real hard drive, but the system detects it as two or more!

The thing is that modern hard drives can be "split" into several partitions, each of which is assigned a separate letter, and with which you can work separately, without affecting the file system of sectors of neighboring logical drives.

As you may have guessed, today we will talk about a program that allows you to manage sections hard disk... And it is called Wondershare Disk Manager.

This small application for Windows allows you to create, delete, move, resize and copy (though with this tighter ...) hard disk partitions. It contains all the most necessary toolswhich are in paid packages, so Wondershare Disk Manager can be compared to the Windows version of Acronis Disk Director:

Comparison of Wondershare Disk Manager with the paid equivalent of Acronis Disk Director

Overall Wondershare Disk Manager is quite simple and convenient manager hard drive. Among the shortcomings, it is worth noting the lack of support for alternative file systems, as well as a slightly inconvenient backup mechanism.

For the rest, the program is quite worthwhile and, most importantly, even a person who has never encountered the process of partitioning a hard disk before can figure it out.

Installing Wondershare Disk Manager

In order to install Wondershare Disk Manager, you just need to run the installer, which you will download in the archive from our website, and follow the wizard's prompts (in fact, constantly press the Next button;)). After the installation is complete, the program registration window will open.

To receive an activation code, you should go through the procedure free registration on the website of the manufacturer of the program. To go to the site, just click the "Get Keycode" button.

In the registration form, you will only need to indicate your name and address email, to which the activation code will be sent. If everything is done correctly, then go to your mailbox, copy the received serial from there and paste it into the "Registration code" field. Above, enter your e-mail and finally press the "Register" button.

Wondershare Disk Manager interface

If everything is done correctly, you will see the main Wondershare Disk Manager window:

Despite the fact that the interface of the program is English, everything is pretty clear here, so there should be no problems with work. At the very top of the window there is a menu bar, to which we practically will not touch, since all functions are brought to the toolbar (below) in the form of colorful buttons.

Below the toolbar, we see a direct work area, divided into three parts: on the left - the events panel, on the top right - a list of hard drives with detailed information about them, and below - a schematic representation of disk space. At the very bottom of the window there is a status line with generalized information about hard disk partitions.

Working with a disc

To start working with sections, just select one of them in the list or on the diagram:

After that, the list of all possible actions on this volume will be displayed on the left side of the operations pane, and the partition size control bars are activated on the diagram.

What I really liked about Wondershare Disk Manager is the ability to resize partitions by simply dragging and dropping the mouse without having to invoke additional dialog boxes.

Here's a simple example: as you can see, the D drive has 8 megabytes of unallocated space. To add it to the main section, simply select it and pull the right size control bar until it stops.

After that, a record about the action we have performed will appear in the list of operations, and three buttons are activated on the toolbar that allow you to cancel, delete or confirm this action.

In our case, to confirm, you need to click the "Apply" button. A confirmation window will appear, in which we will be asked for the last time whether we really confirm our action :). Click "Apply" again and wait for the partition resizing procedure to complete.

It is worth noting that if you need to set the exact size of the section, then for resizing use the wizard, which is called by clicking the "Resize" button on the toolbar.

Creating a new logical drive

In the previous example, we attached the unallocated space to the main partition, but we could have acted differently: take a couple of gigabytes from the main volume and create a new logical disk on the resulting empty area!

To do this, select an unallocated area and call the section creation wizard by clicking the "Create" button. In the first window of the wizard, we can accurately reduce the size of the new volume, after which we will need to go to the next window by clicking the "Next" button:

Here you can choose file system for the new logical drive, give it the name, letter, type and size of clusters ( standard settings may not be changed). After that, it will be enough to press the "Create" button and we will get new section (however, after the confirmation procedure described above).

Removing unnecessary sections

Sometimes there are cases when we no longer need a particular partition and needs to be deleted (for example, to increase space on the main volume). In this case, we can use Wondershare Disk Manager to remove partitions:

Select the section to be destroyed and press the "Delete" button on the toolbar. A window will open in which we can select the type of volume deletion. And there are two of them available: without destroying files and with their complete erasure (the last mode requires a reboot).

In the first case, in the future, if desired, we can easily recover almost all files stored on the partition before it was deleted using the "Recover" function.

The second option allows you to completely clear the contents of the selected partition without the possibility of restoring it. In the "Shred files" mode, we can set the number of data rewriting passes on the selected partition from 3 (Primary) to 35 (Advanced).

After choosing the type of section deletion, it will be enough to press the "Delete" button and confirm your action.

Partition recovery

The next tool in Wondershare Disk Manager is the Partition Recovery Wizard:

It is called by pressing the "Recover" button. In the first window of the wizard, we can choose an automatic or manual scan of the hard drive (I advise the machine). In the next window, the program, having scanned the hard drive space, will display a list of volumes available for recovery.

Select one of them and click "Next". After confirming the action, we will receive full copy the previously deleted partition of the hard disk with all the files stored on it (unless, of course, you did not erase them when deleting the volume).

Copying Sections

The last tool worth mentioning is section copy. Ideally, we should be able to copy any selected volume to any medium that has enough free space.

However, in reality, Wondershare Disk Manager only allows you to store a copy on the same physical medium as the original. At least I couldn't get the program to copy the partition from drive C to drive D (two separate hard drives) :(. Therefore, the benefits of such copying are rather doubtful ...

Working through the context menu

All basic and advanced features of Wondershare Disk Manager can be accessed in several ways. We have already worked with the toolbar and looked at the event bar, however, as in many other applications, sometimes very in a convenient way control is the context menu:

Here, as well as on the events panel, all possible actions on the selected section that are not on the toolbar are collected. For example, the "Explore" item allows you to quickly open the root directory of the selected logical drive, and the "Advanced" section contains additional tools for working with the partition:

These tools include Change Disk Name, Change Drive Letter, Convert File System, Set Activity, Check Disk Integrity, and Hide Partition.

As for me, the Wondershare Disk Manager interface is more than simple, however, if you are afraid of a large amount of various information and menus, then especially for you there is a special wizard mode, which you can switch to by clicking the "Wizard Mode" button (the button on the far right on toolbar):

In this mode, we have access only to the most basic tools for working with partitions (resizing, creating, deleting, copying and restoring volumes). They are presented in the form of buttons with a small explanation, pressing which calls the corresponding wizard described above.

A seasoned sysadmin might twist his finger at his temple if I recommend Wondershare Disk Manager, but a simple user doesn't need much. And the program copes with all the most basic functions (except for copying) perfectly!

conclusions

If you are the owner of a modern capacious hard drive and want to allocate separate logical partitions for a collection of music, films, books, etc., then Wondershare Disk Manager will help you easily and quickly create the required number of volumes for your content and subsequently very flexibly manage them;).

P.S. It is allowed to freely copy and quote this article, provided that an open active link to the source is indicated and the authorship of Ruslan Tertyshny is preserved.

Greetings, dear friends, acquaintances, casual passers-by, mischievous people and other personalities reading this material. Today we will again bring up the topic of backup, namely, we will talk about how to create copies of hard disk partitions. You probably remember that this issue was already raised in an article called "" ..

And in general, the topic itself is not new, because a certain number of articles on this project have already been devoted to it. Including there were articles about creating backups, for example, using 'bat -niki, -, - which help to almost manually create backup copies of the necessary data, and later I talked about the program for automatic backup, namely, - in the article -

But, given that the long-suffering Acronis has still greatly slipped onto commercial rails, and not all software is able to make and restore copies of partitions outside a loaded system, and just as part of expanding the horizons, today I want to tell you about this .. mmm .. a software package like CloneZilla, based on linux "e. With this, so to speak, it will be a little more difficult to work with than with Acronis, but in the end, free and extra experience in working with such software should outweigh all the difficulties.

Globally, it is important to simply follow my instructions and be extremely careful - then everything will work out. I apologize in advance for the rather dubious quality of .. uh .. "screenshots". It happened:(

How to take a snapshot of a Linux and Windows partition or disk

First, we need to download the distribution kit of the program, namely, its image for writing to disk. This can be done. Next, we need to write the downloaded, in fact, to disk. This can be done using the SCD Writer program, which can be downloaded.

After downloading, unpack the archive and run the program, it's just a little:

As a result of this process, you will have a finished disk with the program. To do this, you need to go into the BIOS (DEL button or one of the F2-F12 series at the earliest stage of computer boot). Actually, if a kind of blue or blue-gray screen appears, then you, as they say, got into this most terrible BIOS.

"Welcome to bios" or "Where did I find myself?"
We got ... well .. into the heart of the computer. In order not to break something, we go through the sections carefully. We are only interested in one option - download priority. Next, I will tell you where and what you need to click to boot from our disk. Many computers have a different BIOS, so the settings of one BIOS manufacturer may be completely different from another. But this is not so bad. Even at different versions the same BIOS manufacturer has different settings. Therefore, I will only describe the most common options.

If you see the "Boot" tab, then go into it and there you see 3 fields (they go in a row) first, second, third boot device respectively. We put CD in the first field, HDD in the second, and we are not interested in the third. We go back and exit the bios (f10). Remember to save your changes. The computer will then restart.

We go to Advanced BIOS features (if there is none, then BIOS features) and look for either the Boot Sequence field, or 3 fields (they go in a row) First, Second, Third boot device respectively. If we have a Boot Sequence, then set it like this: CD, HDD, floppy (or by disk labels, for example, D, C, A). If we have three boot device fields, then we set it as in the previous paragraph. We go back and exit the bios (f10). Remember to save your changes. The computer will then restart.

If you did everything right at the stage above, then after saving the settings and exiting. When it happens, you will see something like the following window (sorry for the quality of the photos, it was not possible to do better):

Next, in fact, we need to decide on the launch parameters. If you have a small amount random access memory (up to 1Gb), then it makes sense to use the first line, namely “ CloneZilla live (Default settings, VGA 800x600)", If there is enough memory, then select" Others modes of Clonezilla live”, And there is the third line, namely“ Clonezilla live (To RAM ..) ”, which will allow the program to load into memory and not depend on the CD / DVD-ROM, that is, to work faster.

After downloading, you will need to select the program language. I think that Russian will suit us :) The next tab will offer to change the layout. In most cases this is not required, so feel free to select the item “ Don't touch the layout", And on the next tab, select the" Launch Clonezilla "item.

• Burn / restore partitions / disks from an image
• Write / restore from disk to disk, from partition to partition

In this example, we will consider the first option, because it is more complicated, more interesting, and also because the second involves cloning a partition / disk, that is, if, say, you want to back up a disk with a system to another physical disk, then the data on the other disk they will be overwritten, and it will become a full copy of the first, i.e., in order to consider this option, you will need a blank hard disk or partition, and therefore we will consider the first point for now. On the second, you can practice on your own. Select the item “ device-image work with disks or partitions using images”.

I

On the next tab, you will need to select the image repository, that is, the disk ON WHICH we will save the image of a particular partition / disk. I chose the largest single, i.e. physical, of all disks available to me now. You can choose either an external or any other disk yourself, if only there is enough space on it for the disk / partition image that you are going to copy.

On the next tab you will be asked which folder we want to save the image to. I selected to the root of the disk, i.e. /. You can choose a folder convenient for you.

Next, you will need to decide how much we want to customize. In fact, the expert level is necessary only in case of problems, and the initial, which is also automatic, is suitable for most people and cases. For now, choose the first one, ie “ Beginner: Beginner level”. If you have any problems with creating a backup, write to me, and we will use the second option. If you wish, it is also very welcome after the end of the lesson to “play” on your own with the expert settings, but only carefully and reading all the tips.

Next, you need to choose whether we want to copy the entire disk or one / several of its partitions. Choose what is closer to you. I, within the framework of the article, used the second point, i.e. " Save_local_sections_as_image”.

On the next tab, give the image a name. I leave it as it is, because the date is indicated there, which is convenient.

Now the most important thing is to select the disk or partition (in my example, the partition) that we will copy. You can choose several. The selection is carried out by pressing the SPACEBAR, by clicking on which the * symbol appears opposite the disk or partition, which means that the disk / partition is selected. When you are finished with your selection, click OK.

The next two tabs will ask you about the need to check and restore the file system, as well as the final created image. I used to refuse so as not to waste time, i.e. choose “ Skip checking / repairing source file system ”And, further,“ No, skip checking the saved image”.

After all this, the process will start, which mounts the devices and deals with other needed by the program things. Here you will need to make sure that the correct disk or partition is indicated in yellow, enter y on the keyboard and press the Enter button, after which the copying process will start.

It remains only to press, as asked, Enter, then enter 1 and again Enter. The computer will need to restart. Do not forget to specify the boot from the hard drive, because earlier we set the boot from the CD / DVD drive.

All, backup copy ready. You can rejoice.
Now it remains to learn how to recover from the image.

Restoring from a backup image

Actually, recovering from the image is much easier.

Boot again from the program disk, only this time select the item “ Restore image to local disk " or " Restore image to local partitions”, Depending on whether you saved the partition or disk.

Next, select the image file for recovery and VERY carefully specify the disk / partition where you will restore the contents of this image. Carefully because all information on the disk or partition (whichever you restore) will be replaced by the contents of the image.

After checking everything three times, put y and click OK. Then do it again, because will ask you again and once again you will have to put y and press OK.

We are waiting for the end and - voila - everything is ready!

It remains only to press, as asked, Enter, then enter 1 and again Enter. The computer will need to restart. Do not forget to specify the boot from the hard drive, because earlier we set the boot from the CD / DVD drive.

That's it, the backup has been restored from the image.
Something like this:)

Afterword

These are the pies. Be sure to be attentive and careful, especially the first times .. Well, and then raise your hand, and this piece will be quite a good tool in your arsenal. Not Acronis, of course, with its interface, but it's also quite a powerful thing, especially if you learn how to use all the features of this CloneZilla. And no failures and almost will not be scary - you can always recover from a backup.

I hope this information was useful to you. As always, write comments with questions, wishes, and so on.

Stay with the project - here you are always welcome;)