Clonezilla is an open-source Linux based drive cloning and backup software. Using it, we can create images of the entire drives or their partitions easily. We can later restore them from the backup. it supports all types of file systems and partition types (both MBR and GPT are supported).
This is why having a Clonezilla Live USB drive is always handy. We can use a bootable Clonezilla Live USB drive to carry out all the supported operations without actually installing it on any of the hard drives/solid state drives. It is ideal for making a backup of the hard drive of a brand new computer without actually booting from the hard drive even once.
Here is how you can quickly create a Clonezilla bootable USB drive using Tuxboot:
- First of all download Tuxboot for Windows from https://tuxboot.org/download/.
- Insert a USB flash drive in one of the USB ports on your Windows PC. The USB drive must be formatted with FAT32 partition because Tuxboot does not format the drive. Before formatting, make a backup of any files already present on the target USB drive. For formatting the USB drive, we can right-click on it in the File Explorer and choose Format. In the format window, select FAT32 partition, Quick Format and then click on the Start button.
- Launch Tuxboot. If you have not already downloaded Clonezilla ISO or ZIP file, then choose On-line distribution option. This will first download the Clonezilla files from the internet and then create the USB drive.
- If you have already downloaded Clonezilla from https://clonezilla.org/ then choose the Pre-downloaded option. Select whether it is ISO or ZIP and then choose the downloaded file. When downloading, you have to be careful about the architecture of the system on which you are going to run Clonezilla. If in doubt, just choose the On-line distribution option (step 3) and it will download the correct file for you.
- Select the USB drive type and pick the drive from the drop-down list. And click on the OK button to begin. It will take 10 to 15 minutes for downloading all the files, extracting and copying them to your UBS drive and finally installing the bootloader. After this you can choose to reboot your system and try Clonezilla.
On a typical Windows PC, you have to press F12 key to bring up the boot menu and then choose the USB drive from the list in order to boot from it. Clonezilla loads automatically when it is booted from the USB drive. After this, you can use Clonezilla to clone or backup your storage drives.