From: nospam@needed.invalid   
      
   On Wed, 2/18/2026 4:02 PM, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:55:18 +1100, Axel wrote:   
   >   
   >> Gordon wrote:   
   >>>   
   >>> Clonezilla is for cloning, not backing up.   
   >>   
   >> it does disk imaging   
   >   
   > So does the “dd” command.   
   >   
   >    
   >   
      
   The difference in the example being, it does not   
   use the same space that dd does.   
      
   dd is just fine, in the right circumstances, like if   
   some partitions are damaged, and you want to preserve   
   the state of the disk while you experiment on recovery   
   solutions. dd does not care if you are not fsck-clean.   
      
   But for backing up perfectly good disks with fsck-clean   
   file systems, there are other things you can use.   
      
   64GB disk, OS content 13GB,  Clonezilla compressed partimage 4.7GB.   
      
   Depending on the random contents of the white space on   
   the ~64GB partition, that random content might not   
   compress well. You can "prep" a disk for "dd" backup   
   by using zerofree, but that takes additional time as   
   part of a backup procedure. You can also loopback mount   
   partitions on an uncompressed dd file output... as long   
   as you know the offset. And you can work out the offset   
   using disktype analysis of the dd image.   
      
      Paul   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)