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).