Hello, (Sending it again, as it seems my first one didn't make it through.)
I love Clonezilla and use it for backing up known-good states across both Windows and Gnu/Linux. To me, the power of Clonezilla is right up there, or possibly ahead, of competing projects like Ghost. I have been using Gnu/Linux now for about six years and am pretty comfortable with concepts such as mounting etc. I do, however, still find it very difficult and stressful to answer the questions correctly when backing up and restoring images. Two things that the current Clonezilla menu does that I think could be avoided are the following: 1) The current menu gives a lot of alternatives like "where would you like to save to/restore from". Where possible, it would be great if these were customised, so that when someone was backing up, it said "save to" and when they were restoring, it said "restore from". 2) The menu uses the concept of "partimag". I don't think that it is necessary to introduce this, unless the user chooses to drop to a shell and is manually mounting the location (in which case, it could be printed above the shell prompt). As a suggestion (and please feel free not to follow it), I see the following menus as preferable (after the keymap etc. questions): == Do you wish to backup your computer's disk/partition to a Clonezilla image or restore from a Clonezilla image to one of your computer's disks/partitions? (a) Backup to an image (b) Restore from an image == Do you wish to [backup/restore to, depending on the answer to the above] an entire disk, or just a partition of a disk? (a) An entire disk (b) A partition == [If backing up:] Which [disk/partition, depending on the answer to the above] would you like to backup? [If restoring:] Where is the Clonezilla image that you would like to restore? == [If backing up:] Where would you like to save the image of this [disk/partition, depending on the above answer]? [If restoring:] Which [disk/partition, depending on the above answer] would you like to overwrite with this Clonezilla image? WARNING: this will delete anything that is currently on this [disk/partition, depending on the above answer]. == [Existing final questions about compression etc., though no "mode" question should be necessary, as it should use "savedisk" if question 1 was "(a) backup" and question 2 was "(a) An entire disk", restoreparts if the answers were (b), (b) and so on.] ===== Not only do I find these questions a lot clearer, but I think that they better reflect the way that people think about the process. If I asked someone what they wanted Clonezilla to do, I would expect them to say that they wanted to "Backup their disk to an external hard drive" (note that this sentence fits question 1, 2 and 3 in order), or "Restore the image that I have on this DVD over the top of the windows partition". It also fits with the way that most copying tools work, eg "cp /from/here /to/here" (matching question 1, 2 and 3 in order above). Using Clonezilla is a very anxious procedure at the best of times, as the risks of something going seriously wrong (if a user gets things the wrong way around, for example) are high. I therefore think it would be excellent if the menus were as clear as possible. I'm happy to discuss these thoughts further, but I am not on the list, so please CC me in. Please take this in the way that it was intended. Your software is absolutely brilliant, so I wanted to do my best to help with something that I can help with -- which is making things clearer to users. Regards, Aaron ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Clonezilla-live mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/clonezilla-live
