partclone for Windows

Windows (x64) builds of partclone, the partition imaging tool behind Clonezilla. Built with Cygwin, so the tools work as they do on Linux, including device paths like /dev/sdb2.

Download the latest release zip, unzip it anywhere, and run the tools from PowerShell or cmd. No installation or Cygwin needed.

# Restore a partclone image to a full-size raw partition image
.\partclone.restore.exe -s D:\backups\data.pcl.img -o D:\data.img -W -C

-W writes a file the full size of the original partition. On an NTFS drive the file is sparse, so it only takes up as much space as the partition had in use. -C skips the check that the drive has room for the full size.

More examples:

# Restore onto a partition instead (Windows Disk 1, partition 2)
.\partclone.restore.exe -s D:\backups\data.pcl.img -o /dev/sdb2

# Back up an NTFS partition, then verify the image
.\partclone.ntfs.exe -c -s /dev/sdb2 -o D:\backups\data.pcl.img
.\partclone.chkimg.exe -s D:\backups\data.pcl.img

Supports NTFS, ext2/3/4, FAT, exFAT, btrfs, XFS, HFS+, APFS, F2FS and minix, plus partclone.dd for sector-by-sector copies of anything else. The zip also includes mkntfs, ntfsfix and ntfsinfo.

Warning: /dev/... access needs an elevated terminal. Take a volume offline in diskpart before backing it up or restoring onto it: there's no VSS/snapshot support, and partclone can't tell when Windows is using a volume. The README inside the zip has more usage and safety notes.

What this repo is

A friendly fork of Thomas-Tsai/partclone. The windows branch is the latest upstream release plus a few commits for Windows:

1. Cygwin port: portability fixes across all filesystem modules. Details in BUILD-WINDOWS.md, including a subtle ntfs-3g struct-packing landmine.
2. Log file falls back to %TEMP%, so the tools run without -L (Windows has no /var/log).
3. -C also skips the free-space check on -W restores, so a raw image can go on a drive with less free space than the full partition size.
4. -W output stays sparse on NTFS: a raw image of a 2 TB partition with 44 GB in use takes about 44 GB, not 2 TB.

These are kept here rather than upstreamed for now.

How releases are made

• A daily check-upstream job opens an issue when upstream publishes a new release.
• The maintainer runs ci/update-to.sh <version> to rebase windows onto the new tag, pushes, and triggers build-release.
• CI builds everything from source on a clean windows-latest runner, runs the tests (ci/test.sh, ci/test-dist.ps1), and publishes the zip as release v<version>-win<N>.

To build locally, install Cygwin with the packages listed in build.yml, then run ci/build.sh && ci/test.sh. See BUILD-WINDOWS.md for details.

License

GPL-2.0, same as upstream partclone (see COPYING). Each release zip includes a SOURCES.txt pointing to the exact source of every bundled component (partclone, ntfs-3g, userspace-rcu and the Cygwin runtime).

All credit for partclone goes to Thomas Tsai and the partclone contributors. This repo only makes it run on Windows.