Restoring image with Clonezilla (general questions)

I might as well ask here.

I backed up my 20Gb Win7 partition using with Clonezilla. The result image is only 5.5Gb large. My question is, if I restore this image to my SSD. What are some important things to consider?

I discussed imaging with a Linux-nerd (a good friend). And like all nerds he can give you all information but when you ask further, he suddenly has no details. Funny nerds... For instance like he said, well you also have to backup your partition table. Then I asked, if I put back my clonezilla image, wouldn't it restore everything incl this partition table/mbr and so forth automatically? And then he shrugged his shoulders and said "I don't know".

So there you have it my first question. Do you guys know? Cause I'm not even sure if this partition table would be saved separate. Would it mean I also have to recreate this exact partition as it is now, with the exact amount of blocks, before restoring this clonezilla-image?

Confused, so Hope you can help me out..

 

"if I put back my clonezilla image, wouldn't it restore everything incl this partition table/mbr and so forth automatically?"

- Yes clonezilla will backup everything, data, metadata, partition table, MBR etc. However, the new SSD has to be large capacity than your old HDD partition.

- Also clonezilla is not the best options to migrate your OS to a SSD as clonezilla does not yet support auto alignment of SSD, which is key to the performance and life span of your SSD. I'd suggest you use Acronis, Paragon or Marium or Image for Linux/Windows.

 

Thanks for your reply.

And no I wasn't migrating my win7 install from sata-hhd to SSD using Clonezilla. I did a fresh install of WIn7 on my SSD with proper alignment during setup with diskpart. Somehting with align=1024. Found a howto on sevenforum. Then backed it up off this SSD with Clonezilla.

Clonezilla will however put back this proper alignment as well, when restoring this image back to my SSD would it?

 

That I really don't know, but my guess is if the image that Clonezilla took was properly aligned (freshly installed), then when put it back to the SSD it should still be the same alignment. However I am not 100% sure about this.

A safe way to go is to use the other pieces of software that I suggested which can do auto alignment on SSD: Acronis, Paragon or Macrium Reflect (free version available for Macrium). IFL/IFW could do manual alignment right before performing image restore: select "Align to 2048 sector" option. All these imaging Apps work on SSD.

 

I have used Clonezilla to back up and restore Linux and it has worked great to date. However, when I used it to image Win 7, when I tried to restore, I got a blank screen (desktop) when I booted off the restored Win 7. So for me, Clonezilla did not work with Win properly. I don't know the details or the why etc, just that it only worked reliably on Linux. So I use Macrium instead for Win when needed. Could be just user error, but I thought I'd mention it, for what it's worth....