[ale] Clonezilla?

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

On 10/23/25 00:30, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> Do you really need Clonezilla for cloning a VM? Most VMs are stored
> in just a few files so you really only need to transfer those
> instead of trying to clone the VM from inside itself while running.

^^^^^ this!

Clonezilla is pretty complex for what it does, IMHO.  Most hypervisors with GUIs have a VM-export capability.  Often, they will use some ODF format.  I've never done it that way myself, so I'm fuzzy on the details.

At best, Clonezilla is a complicated dd+gz (or better, use ddrescue instead).

I've cloned LVM LVs that hold VMs to other systems during VM migrations, but if you aren't using those, then you are likely using file-based storage and can just shutdown the VM, export the VM settings and transfer the full OS (vdi, img, qcow2, vdmk, whatever) + the exported XML that describes the VM to the other machine, drop the file in the expected location, import the XML VM settings, then you probably just need to check the settings for the storage location and the network device to be used.

Or use this as a chance to validate your backup methods actually work.  If your VM backups don't support moving to new hardware and have clear steps to restore to that other hardware (different VM host), then I'd say you need to fix your backup and restore method.

I'd never use images for backups. Way too storage inefficient, slow, and the system being cloned needs to be shutdown/quiesced to get uncorrupted images.  There are better backup options that don't have any of those issues that are much more efficient.

But for a 1-time move, just shutdown the VM and transfer the "file" to the remote system.

Of course, if you don't have access outside the two VMs, then you have no good choice except to use your backup methods for the migration, assuming your backups are performed from inside the VM.