Clone Kali installation

[neminem85]

Hello everyone!!

I have a question.
What is in your opinion the best way to do an exact clone of my Kali system as it is now??
I know there are a few options out there, like clonezilla, gnome-disks or even dd from terminal.

But i would like to go depeer in this. Specifically concerning clone to image vs clone to hd.

Having a full clone of our system to a specific date may be useful in so many ways and spare us hours of work to return to our beloved system after a faulty upgrade or something to brought us to a broken system.

Now.. i noticed that you can create a partition image even from gnome-disks. which sounds pretty interesting. but, what would be the best and fastest way to do it in your opinion? I currently have 8gb used out of 128gb (partition of a 256gb ssd).

so here are the specific questions i have:

1. if i create a partition image with gnome-disks, would it be 128gb (the size of my partition, regardless of the free space on it) or would it be 8gb (the size of the occupied space as of now) ?

2. if the answer to the first question is 8gb, then, when i'll restore that image to this same partition, would it still show as a 128gb partition, or will it create an 8gb partition with all that stuff inside leaving out all the remaining free space?

I know that this can be done from terminal utilizing dd, but i am a little bit concerned by the time that would take. Because dd would create an exact copy of the hard drive, even the free space of it, so the image would occupy 128gb.

Of course if you have suggestions on how to accomplish this in a better and faster way with other software or in other ways, please let me know :)


Thank you in advance !!!

[grid]

I like clonezilla myself...always worked well for me.

[neminem85]

I like clonezilla myself...always worked well for me.

Yes it's a great software. But i found another amazing alternative that will not require to backup even the entire partition but just the actual occupied space, and it's present by default in virtually any linux distro.
It's a command line tool called rsync. It works like a charm, support also incremental backups and has plenty of options.

For the non-fans of command line there is also a GUI for it, it's called grsync. But it's limited compared to the command line counterpart.

It's SUPERFAST (i backed up my entire root folder onto a usb 3 thumdrive, 11gb in less than 15 minutes, just amazing)

[grid]

Thanks for the tip, neminem85. Not used rsync myself but will look into it.