What is Reddit's opinion of Rescuezilla?

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I'd backup all my file before starting to reinstall Windows. I reformat the drive, and do a fresh install. I would not select "keep my files". You should be able to delete all the hard drive partions during the Windows install, which forces it to reformat the drive. You can download Rescuezilla here https://rescuezilla.com/

you could try https://rescuezilla.com/download.html

You just need a couple of things

USB stick that is bigger than 2 gigs

rufus - lets you create the rescuzilla image onto the usb stick to boot from startup

once your in rescuezilla, you select the drive you want to backup

then you just need an additional drive to store the image/backup.

Then you push that clone/image to the new drive

Besides Timeshift, I've also gotten into the habit of once a month making an image of my partitions with Rescuezilla. Timeshift is an excellent software but since failing to restore once I like to have that bit of added security.

Rescuezilla is a free easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) for Clonezilla: https://rescuezilla.com/ (full disclosure, I develop Rescuezilla)

Most people find it way easier to use than Clonezilla, so it's worth checking out.

Importantly Rescuezilla does not yet have APFS "filesystem-aware" support as of writing (see below) but Clonezilla does have support, I believe.

tho migration tools never work very well

you are much better off just backing up your important data and reinstalling windows on the new drive

if you absolutly must use a cloneing program.....you should use acronis true image....or https://rescuezilla.com/

I've recently started using: https://rescuezilla.com/ Acronis, and Macrium are also great alternatives. LTSC is how Windows should be, IMHO. No junk. That being said, LTSC does require an enterprise volume license agreement. It is not available to consumers. That's because Microsoft wants to turn Windows into an Ad serving/telemetry platform.

I had to re-read your comment before I realised it's the laptop that wont boot. So just to clarify, the laptop wont switch on? I'm not even sure how you know the HDD is OK in that case.

If somehow I've misread this and the laptop will switch on, you could use something like RescueZilla which will let you boot from a USB into a graphical environment (for a well known program called Clonezilla) where you can backup and restore entire images or individual files.

You'd still need another hard drive or USB drive connected to copy to.

If however the laptop isn't working at all, then I would agree with /u/hotpants86 you will need to extract the hard drive and put it either in an external enclosure or hook it up to another PC to get the data off.

For the image backup, try Rescuezilla. You would burn it to a USB flash drive (or install Ventoy and copy the ISO to the drive), connect the destination drive, reboot, and select the flash drive to boot from at the BIOS boot options.

Here's a video that shows the process.

The current version of Rescuezilla has a different Step 6 - you can change compression settings. If you have the space and leave it uncompressed, you should be able to browse the backup image using the Image Explorer feature (I haven't tested it though).

If you want to do a secondary backup for critical files, it can be as simple as manually copying them to an external drive.

It certainly looks nice, but apparently the current version 2.1.3 cannot yet resize partitions automatically. Also it doesn't support cloning yet:

> Unfortunately, Rescuezilla does not yet support "cloning" (which Clonezilla calls "device-device" mode).

Clonezilla

• Popular (It's good to know what other people are using)
  
• Free
  
• Fast
  
• Works with Linux, Windows, and RAIDs
  
• Open Source, updated, relivent.
  
• Rescuezilla is the simplified, friendly GUI version of Clonezilla.

So, I recommend Clonezilla over Rescuezilla. Mainly because Clonezilla is already going to be on the approved list of softwares for big companies.

Hi harry_fine,

> And then what happens to the efi partition formatted in vfat?

There's no need to reformat external SSD drive. Rescuezilla can safely backup your NVMe drive to your external SSD whether it's formatted in ext4, NTFS, FAT32 or several other filesystems.

> And then what happens to the efi partition formatted in vfat?

Rescuezilla is an imaging program. It turns your EFI partition and root partition into a bunch of files (very large files!).

The latest version (Rescuezilla v1.0.5.1) has a few bugs which you need to be aware of. It doesn't handle special characters such as quotation marks, dollar signs, hash symbols etc (' " $ # etc) and cannot be back up or restore very small partitions (typically around 40 megabytes). Also if you have 16GB RAM or greater, performance is VERY slow unless you use a workaround. Finally, there is no support to boot in EFI mode using Rescuzilla v1.0.5.1, so it's recommended you temporarily enable legacy BIOS boot to make your backup/restore. All these bugs and enhancements have already been fixed, but the next version (Rescuezilla v1.0.6) is still a few weeks away from being released.

I think Rescuezilla v1.0.5.1 is suitable for your use-case even given the above caveats. I hope you stick around for v1.0.6 and beyond!