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Installing Rescuezilla from the standalone deb package

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Shasheen Ediriweera edited this page Oct 9, 2021 · 23 revisions

Note: You can download the latest Rescuezilla ISO image here. This page is intended for advanced Linux users of Debian-like systems. (Packages for other Linux distributions are planned)

The Rescuezilla ISO image is about 1gb in size, but the main Rescuezilla application is also distributed as a small (around 400KB, yes kilobyte) deb package that can be installed on Ubuntu 20.04 or newer (and likely on environments like Debian and Linux Mint too). Though the Rescuezilla deb package still has a lot of dependencies like the qemu-utils package that provides support for restoring virtual machines images, so the total install is still hundreds of megabytes. In the future the dependencies may be optimized so more are "suggested"/optional. Also, please note that Rescuezilla still uses the system-wide Python installation, and python dependencies from the package manager, as I have not yet configured a virtualenv environment for Rescuezilla that can deploy as a deb package.

Important: Rescuezilla is currently most widely tested within the the official ISO image, and there are some dependencies that Rescuezilla compiles that are not yet provided by Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint package managers (eg. partclone-nbd/partclone-utils). This means installing from deb package will only get you Backup/Restore/Clone features and Image Explorer will be limited only to VM images, not yet the partclone images used by Clonezilla/Rescuezilla.

Installing

  1. Consider if the pre-made ISO image is more suitable for your use-case
  2. Download deb package the releases page (it's under the 'Assets' section right at the bottom)
  3. Open a terminal, run sudo apt-get update then sudo apt-get install gdebi
  4. Install the deb package and dependencies using eg, sudo gdebi ~/Downloads/rescuezilla_2.2-1_all.deb (Rescuezilla has a lot of dependencies)
  5. Add the line 'nbd' to /etc/modules and reboot. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT.
  6. Launch Rescuezilla using /usr/sbin/rescuezilla
  7. Enjoy using the Backup/Restore/Clone features (but Image Explorer limited to VM images)

Troubleshooting.

Rescuezilla gets stuck at "Identifying disk drives..."

The issue is the 'nbd' Linux kernel module. Rescuezilla tries to loads it with modprobe, but it appears to take time to fully initialize so when the nbd-client command tries to access a /dev/nbd device the program hangs forever. The best solution is to simply add 'nbd' to /etc/modules and reboot, just like step 5 of the instructions above has documented :)

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