Rescuezilla is a specialist Ubuntu-based distribution designed for system rescue tasks, including backups and system restoration. It was forked from the "Redo Backup & Rescue" project which was abandoned in 2012. Like its predecessor, it allows a "bare-metal restore" after any hardware failure directly from the live image. Some of the features include: works directly from the live CD/USB image; works with Linux, macOS and Windows; automatically searches a local area network for drives to backup to or restore from; recovers lost or deleted data files; includes configuration tools for managing disk and drives. Rescuezilla uses a simplified LXDE user interface.
To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.
Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.
Colour scheme:green text = latest stable version, red text = development or beta version. The function determining beta versions is not 100% reliable due to a wide variety of versioning schemes.
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Super tool for cloning and backups of entire disks. I use this a lot, as I liberate old windows 10 laptops to run Linux Mint. So I just clone an entire Linux Mint installation onto the disk, adjust size with gparted as needed. 9 out of ten it will just boot straight into Linux Mint. On other cases I migt have to adjust something in the bios.
I hope at some point this tool will also be available in the software manager. Maybe it might not work with the disk Linux Mint is running on, but I would love to use it for cloning disk to disk without booting from usb. And maybe some day it might also work with the running disk, so one could clone a running installation, like M Reflect version 8.
Thank you very much for this wonderfull software. ððŧ
Version: 2.6.2 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-06-23 Country: Brazil Votes: 0
I really like rescuezilla.
Pros:
Easy to use and to backup and restore disk images. I could backup and save my windows disk easily, and it's really fast too.
Cons:
Unfortunately while trying to restore my BTRFS CachyOS disk image I couldn't the system simply wouldn't boot... I even looked it up, Rescuezilla seems to support the BTRFS, but not on my side... that's the only problem...
Suggestions:
Please make it possible to browse my disks while backing up or restoring my files
Please enable sound, While waiting for the backup or restore the image, watching a video to kill some time would be really nice.
It's ok but there's much better alternatives to choose from. The fonts used have been mentioned by others, back in the day i'm sure they were a reasonable choice, but today they're difficult at modern resolutions.
There's something up with using local drives, it doesn't allow copying to them. There's probably some jiggery-pokery using a terminal window but tbh, this far into the 21st century that seems a little archaic when the developer could no doubt fix this.
Considering how long this has been knocking around, I would like to have seen some leaps forward in terms of developing the overall offering, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Maybe the dev thinks it's good enough as-is, or that if users find it difficult to deal with then it's over their head. Whichever the reason, I can't say anything very encouraging about it.