Shell command: ntfsclone

Backing up and restoring an NTFS partition

$ sudo /usr/sbin/ntfsclone --save-image --output /mnt/bkp/windows-clone-2025-01-25 /dev/nvme0n1p3

Note: the backed up image file is smaller than the NTFS partition (318G):

$ ls -lh /mnt/bkp/windows-clone-2025-01-25 
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 272G Jan 26 17:10 /mnt/bkp/windows-clone-2025-01-25

$ lsblk /dev/nvme0n1p3
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
nvme0n1p3 259:3    0  318G  0 part

Now: Restarting the computer with Windows and changing (deleting, renaming, creating) some files.

Then: Again restarting the computer, this time in Linux.

$ sudo /usr/sbin/ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/nvme0n1p3 /mnt/bkp/windows-clone-2025-01-25

As far as I can tell, the only difference to using dd is that ntfsclone creates «sparse files» (which account for the smaller image files).

Shell command: ntfsclone

Backing up and restoring an NTFS partition

See also