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Only generate checksums for individual files in partitions after all partitions have been cloned. Disk-Image/Partitions-Image

Open barkoder opened this issue 1 year ago • 1 comments

As of clonezilla-live-3.1.1-27-amd64.iso, this is how generating checksums using "Device - image > Disk-Image" of an NTFS drive containing mutiple partitions works. Also I know that this is an older version, but I checked the change log to see if clonezilla's behavior had changed in the newer versions, but it doesn't seem to have. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

  1. Clone Partition 1.
  2. Generate checksums of files in partition 1.
  3. Clone Partition 2.
  4. Generate checksums of files in partition 2.
  5. Clone Partition 3.
  6. Generate checksums of files in partition 3.
  7. Clone Partition 4.
  8. Generate checksums of files in partition 4.

But this is suboptimal. What if the device being cloned fails during step 2, step 4 or step 6. This would result in a failure to clone the remaining partitions.

Generating checksums means reading the files, which may be highly fragmented on mechanical drives. This significantly increases wear on the disk(which might result in failure before all partitions have been cloned). So checksumming individual files must only happen after all partitions have been cloned first.

The safest way to clone disk(containing 4 partitions) and generate file checksums is...

  1. Clone Partition 1.
  2. Clone Partition 2.
  3. Clone Partition 3.
  4. Clone Partition 4.
  5. Generate checksums of files in partition 1.
  6. Generate checksums of files in partition 2.
  7. Generate checksums of files in partition 3.
  8. Generate checksums of files in partition 4.

This is also how it should work when cloning only a few selected partitions. If I select Partitions 2 and 4 and tell clonezilla to generate checksums, then clonezilla should...

  1. Clone Partition 2.
  2. Clone Partition 4.
  3. Generate checksums of files in partition 2.
  4. Generate checksums of files in partition 4.

Thank you so much for clonezilla! It's amazing!

barkoder avatar Oct 22 '24 00:10 barkoder

Yes, sure. This would be better. Thanks for your suggestion. We will improve this in the future.

Steven

stevenshiau avatar Oct 23 '24 12:10 stevenshiau

Please give testing Clonezilla live >= 3.2.0-25 or 20241208-* a try. Let us know the results if you test that. Thanks.

Steven

stevenshiau avatar Dec 08 '24 12:12 stevenshiau

Tested clonezilla-live-3.2.0-32-amd64.iso .

Cloning is prioritized first now.

Thanks!

barkoder avatar Jan 12 '25 18:01 barkoder