 Hi guys, my name is Daniel Rosel, welcome back to my YouTube channel, youtubemediumanddanielrosel.com. So what I wanted to do in today's video is to demonstrate something a little bit scary. This is living on the edge you could say. As you can see I am recording my desktop with a camcorder, that's because what I'm going to demonstrate and test is doing a clonezilla disk image restore here. So let me just explain firstly what I have going on in this computer. Now I've talked about this in a couple of videos before, I've shown a restore using timeshift which is a much more, you could say a gentler restore option that I've used plenty of times. Clonezilla I haven't yet, you're actually used but I have gone through this test process a few times. It's always a little bit nerve wracking, this isn't a virtual machine, this is like my real desktop that you're looking at here. So the first thing that I want to do before touching anything is to just verify. So yeah in terms of the setup, this is SDA which is the first SSD on the computer, there is another drive called STB and that's where I put the clonezilla images, there's a third drive called SDC, that's where I put the timeshift snapshots and there's a fourth drive called SDD which is Windows on it so I actually have four drives in this computer. But the ones that are relevant for this exercise are SDA and SDB, we're going to tamper with SDA a bit and we're going to then roll back to the clonezilla backup on SDB. So the first thing I'm going to do is to just bring this guy over here and you can see this is the, firstly I'm just making sure that the backup exists before I go ahead and destroy my own data intentionally. So I took this, it says all the time, looking at the timestamps about 12, 12 and the current time is around 5pm, 5 or 6pm, let me just check, it doesn't really matter for this video, 8, 6pm so there's been about 6 hours since I took this backup and I backed up onto SDB so we're going to be restoring from SDB so it should be relatively quick given that it's running just between two disks that are both connected to the motherboard on SATA so it's not even an SSH restore. Now I have done obviously a bit of work on the computer in the intervening period. This folder, wedding photos is new but this guy's been sitting on my desktop for the last few days. It's a video that I made for one of these YouTube channels, not this one, Daniel Roso but my business one DSR Ghostwriting. So that's a good thing to test. Now let me just test a few things because let's not go, let's do this properly. This is my home music directory and I'm just going to delete a couple of folders. Let's pick something with not much in it just in case this does actually fail and I'm screwed and the rest of my day would be completely ruined if this fails in some way. Let's go for telegram desktop, that's not super important to me and this onion share thing I just installed it to test out sharing a website on the dark web, I don't actually care about it anymore so I can just get rid of that anyway. I'm just going to delete two folders so let's just make, I'm going to make a mental note of those, the onion share folder and the telegram desktop folder and let's also just nuke this video so I'm not going crazy, crazy here, I'm just deleting one file and two folders, one file on the desktop, two folders in the root user directory so that's that and now I'm going to go ahead and try to do a restore in order to get that data back. Okay guys welcome back to part two of the video so it's time to do the actual restore here. So I've just gone ahead, I have my clonezilla connected over live USB over here and my computer screen active here, now a couple of things to say firstly about this so the restore process is I think it's fair to say your average backup user whether that's a professional or an amateur like me, you're going to be doing probably 20 to 30 times the backups as you do the restores, you hope really not to use the restores but you do need to test them so this is probably a less familiar process for most clonezilla users so it really pays to do two things, firstly to read the documentation, they have good restore documentation, there are also a couple of videos on YouTube, I found a couple of Linux ones on virtual machines which is partially why I made this to show it on the real thing on bare metal but firstly just read those resources because they will help you out. So I'm just going through the first thing here and basically we're going to be doing device image, now if that confuses you just remember when we backed up we backed up device image so therefore we're doing device image again as just the polarities as such are reversed instead of backing up from our device from our computer to image to a clonezilla image we're going to be taking the clonezilla image and putting that onto the computer so it is device image just in the different directions so that's what we'll go for, as we said in the first part of this video we're simply backing up from one hard drive on the computer or it should be more accurate one SSD to another SSD so this is a local device restore, we're not, I mean you could if I had backed up to the SSH to my NAS there's no reason why we couldn't restore directly from the NAS over SSH but this is just a local device one for speed and for ease of demonstration purposes okay now clonezilla goes through, it does its thing of finding the drives on the computer so far so good it's found that I have four drives connected as I mentioned SSD, A, B, C and D that's great and the next thing it does is it maps out all the partition so that's what that's what it is doing now at the bottom of the screen okay so it's finished that process and here's where again we need to slow down and just make sure that we don't screw up because the consequences of screwing up a clonezilla backup or restore restore are prodigious if you get the source and destination wrong you will simply overwrite the you know if you let's just take an example that if you put the target as as the source in other words you're trying to back up a hard drive and you accidentally set that as target and you accidentally set your empty SSD a source or what's going to happen is you will completely overwrite your hard drive with nothing there'll be no information you'll wipe out the hard drive unless you have a backup you're absolutely screwed on the other scenario let you know let's not go into what could go wrong here essentially would be a situation in which I would put the wrong I would restore this I mean if I if I restored this system onto the onto the backup containing drive that may not seem like such a bad thing but that would mean we'd wipe out the backup and we've just broken the system a bit so we'd not be able to recover that data so that would be pretty bad as well so you need now we need to mount a device as home part image clonzil image repository so that we can read and I'm emphasizing the word read here so that we can read or save the image in home part image so read is what we're going to be doing here we're going to we this is where the where we backed up to uh where I backed up to the first partition of sdb I can see here it's a 223 gigabyte ssd yes that's sdb is my clonzilla backup drive and it's in the first and only partition so that is where we're going to read from not save to sdb one um and it's found that I have the backup created there it's it's found one folder in that in that entire um in that entire partition and there's only one partition in the drive so in that whole drive there is one folder and that is the backup so um now I tried before to click into you do now want to click into the image um and you'll see just in a bit this is where the first few times I tried to do a test restore I screwed up I tried to click into the sub folder and then it'll tell you um you you know we can't mount this uh as a repoint and you'll see why in just a second so just one good thing about clonzilla is um before you go ahead and do the fatal option it does give you a cut it does give you a couple of chances to uh abort basically so we haven't committed anything yet so if you're not sure if you're if you're not 100 sure just basically turn off the computer you can't actually abort a backup without adverse consequence but once it started writing on a restore it's much more dangerous so if you're not sure turn it off and have a breather that's my advice I'm going to actually go for beginner mode because um I looked at the the backup that we talk and nothing nothing special should be required to restore us um now here's where again it gets different let me just zoom up a small bit over here usually we're doing save uh disk or save partition to either save the whole disk or just save partition on it as a backup so we did save disk we save the local disk as an image and because again there's there's just this uh that image actually contains the entire disk not just not just sd a one it contains everything on sd a so if you do restore disk go for rest save disk restore disk save parts restore parts and if you do the restore partitions it'll give you an option so I'm going to go be going for restore disk because I'm going to have everything that everything in that image folder now choose image file to restore remember what I said a few minutes ago um it'll identify clone zilla is a smart program I mean it's brilliant in its simplicity in how low level it is uh but it's able to see if you if I had one two three four um backup image folders there it you know we'd be able to scroll through and say the second one is what I want for this computer so this is the only one so it makes life easy for us and restore disk here and again it's it's clone zilla I can't say enough good things about clone zilla every time you're maybe in danger it does stuff like you can see the uh uh upper upper caps here choose the target disk be over it and all data on the entire disk will be lost and replaced so do not get this wrong um so the target's fine sd a is my um primary that's where my linux lives um and that is yes going to be our target um I'm going to go for it no actually I'm not going to check the image before restoring because I checked it in the backer process which was about six hours ago so I don't think there's been any real risk of data degradation in the period uh since that so I'm going to click on okay now um I'll just do shutdown once we have run through it yeah it does a double thing there you go are you sure you want to continue um the program is not started by clone zilla server so we haven't done anything yet so basically the last thing to do here is just to make sure um warning warning warning the existing data will be overwritten all existing data will be lost the follow so let me ask you again and it's worth reading this I'm going to read it out to you let me ask you again the following step is to restore an image to the hard disk slash partition on this machine and that's given that provides the path to the uh it's mounted my backup um as home part image so uh this now this is really final stage it does not it asks you two times not three so I'm going to click on why for yes and uh I'm going to hope that I've just not ruined my day and now the restore is in progress so I'm basically going to go ahead and uh just turn off the video now and hopefully I will be resuming the screencast when we have a good um so you can just see in terms of what's actually happening so basically it's uh overriding uh sda and it's you can see the rate here is about 14 gigs a second remember I said that the um that the speed here will be quick now uh important thing that I should have said if you're doing this on a desktop I would recommend doing what I'm doing and uh having that desktop on a UPS you do not want to have a power failure while this restore process is happening it's really really dangerous um now in terms of what's in the speed about this 11 it's going down a bit to 10 gigs a second this is going to be about a uh you can see remaining clock is at 12 minutes so about a 12 I would estimate probably a 15 minute job it takes a few minutes to estimate the time correctly um and what's happening is it's restoring so you can see the device size is approximately 400 and 80 gigabytes that's what we're storing onto um there's 124 gigs in use and uh it's basically now just copying the data blocks from sdb onto sda restore the video in a few minutes um and what I hope to see is that we have done a done a restore everything's fine boot into the computer and ideally on my desktop I mean that that would be uh that would be good to know for me to enjoy the rest of my evening and then on the desktop we want to see that video that I'd leave it in those two folders and if all those things are in place then we can say that this has been a successful test restore hey guys welcome back to video and very pleased report that the restore has been successful so uh as you can see here this is my desktop um I can pause video myself and just see what's moved but I can see uh I obviously cleaned up my desktop some point this afternoon and we have our video of myself is back the one that we deleted that's back on the desktop and also going back to my home directory we can see that the couple of test folders the onion share folder and telegram desktop both of which we deleted as a test have been restored so that was it that was a test restore from a clone zella image uh I've done that a couple of times on to test mediums and on test and on an old laptop I've never done that um on my live computer so I'm glad to say that my computer uh has not been destroyed by that test and it's working so clone zella really really great tool for uh doing disk imaging free tool powerful tool you do need to take your time reading the documentation uh but uh just just to demonstrate that uh it really can guess um a computer back uh just at that deep low level so very useful thing to have in your backup strategy thanks for watching uh any questions as usual I'm available at danielrosil.co.io thanks for watching