Clonezilla backup times
I have been waiting to try doing Clonezilla backups to a pluggable SATA disk, compared to an external USB drive.
My external USB drive is a WD MyBook 6Gb on a USB3.0 connection
My pluggable SATA disk is a 2.5 in Seagate Barracuda 1Tb
The disk I chose to backup is my internal Samsung 4Tb SSD. It contains 12 partitions with sizes varying from a tiny EFI partition to a 500Gb partiton for VM’s.
I did one backup to the USB drive and another backup to the SATA hotplug drive.
The results were recorded from a clock in minutes… clonezilla does not have a timeing facility.
| Drive | Write time | Check time | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| USB | 63 | 55 | 118 |
| SATA | 67 | 118 | 185 |
Quite a surprise . The SATA disk backup took about the same time to write the images, but twice as long to do the check.
That is different to what I got using rsync.
These were the rsync results
| Drive | Time |
|---|---|
| USB | 8 min 12 sec |
| SATA | 2 min 52 sec |
The USB drive for rsync was not the WD Mybook, it was a 1Tb Seagate drive.
The data were my data directory… one large partition, not a whole disk.
So the SATA drive is considerably faster with rsync, but slower with Clonezilla, especially for checking images.
I can only conclude that Clonezilla has some internal limit to its read/write speed , so that its performance can not be improved by using faster hardware. Maybe it is limited by the compression speed.
There is one rider. The version of Clonezilla used for the USB backup was 3.1.0-22. The version used for the SATA backup was 3.1.2-9. That was because I got a new download when I modified clonezilla to detect the SATA drive. I should repeat the USB backup with the new version, but the result is really quite clear.
I may as well use the USB drives for Clonezilla. The pluggable SATA disks will be more useful for snapshots with rsync.
End of project. It cost some $$ and time to setup the pluggable SATA disk cage and to modify clonezilla. The result is not what I expected.