Rescuezilla 2.4 is a new version of the application that defines itself as “the swiss army knife of OS recovery”. Free and open source, that’s another one of those software tools it’s dedicated to maintenance, rescue and recovery which should not be missing in your arsenal.

Rescuezilla is a fork and continuation of the project Backup and restore again, which was on the road between 2012 and 2020. If the name rings a bell, it’s because it has a lot in common with the great Clonezilla. In fact, its basic function clone a computer, partition, or disk be reproduced in another medium or in one’s own, they are very similar. But compared to the intimidating text-mode interface of Clonezilla, it provides a friendly graphical interface that makes this type of task easier and adds some extra features.

The latest version of Rescuezilla 2.4 was released this week with one major change, an update to the Ubuntu 22.04 which serves as a base. It has two main functions which are defined by its name, Backup and restore Y clone. The first generates images of the entire drive to an image file on a removable device or over the network, or restores such an image to the drive. The cloning function works directly from disk to disk. The main screen also has functions for checking the image or browsing its contents. And it is possible to limit functions to only certain partitions.

In addition to its main features, Firefox as a web browser includes Gparted, a text editor and a terminal emulator. The desktop system is minimal LXDE, and the Start menu includes an image viewer, a file manager, a screenshot tool, a text-mode TestDisk file recovery tool, and PhotoRec, which can scan damaged media or damaged image files.

Rescuezilla is able to work with different disk formats and file systems and work on backup and recovery tasks on Windows, Mac and Linux computers with really minimal requirements (1 or 2 GB of RAM) in practically the entire range of existing processors from Intel and AMD.

Its launch is similar to other rescue tools. You download the Rescuezilla 2.4 ISO image, “burn” it to an optical disc, or better yet, a USB flash drive with applications like balenaEtcher or Rufus, and you have a “live” bootable media ready to go. A very useful tool similar to others (even more complete) such as Linux-based SystemRescueCd or Windows PE-based Hiren’s BootCD PE.