How To Use Clonezilla With a LUKS-Encrypted Destination

Published February 5, 2026.

Clonezilla is popular Free and Open Source Software for disk imaging and cloning.

It has long supported backing up LUKS-encrypted partitions in an intelligent manner, and will simply prompt for the password when beginning the job...

But of course, if you are backing up an encrypted disk, you will want the backup image to be encrypted as well!

Unfortunately, backing up to a LUKS-encrypted destination is not as streamlined -- but it can be accomplished with the instructions below.

What About Encrypted Images?

It should be noted that Clonezilla does have a menu option to encrypt images with ECryptfs. If your backup image is the only thing you need encrypted, then using this built-in feature will be faster and easier.

However, if you are storing your Clonezilla images on an external hard drive that also contains other types of backup data, you may wish to use LUKS to protect the entirety of its contents. It is for that scenario that these instructions were written.

Instructions

Clonezilla expects images to be in /home/partimag. Our goal is to mount the folder of images on our LUKS-encrypted drive to that path, allowing Clonezilla to proceed normally.

Getting Started

1. Start Clonezilla as usual: select your resolution, language, and keyboard configuration.

2. On the "Start Clonezilla" screen, select Start_Clonezilla.
   (⚠️ Knowing that we will be using the terminal, you may be tempted to Enter_shell here. Do not do this. It will open a shell as user, while we want a shell as root.)

3. On the next screen, select device-image to "work with disks or partitions using images".

4. Finally, on the "Mount Clonezilla image directory" screen, select enter_shell.

Terminal Commands

Now that you are in a shell as root, mount your images directory to /home/partimag as follows:

1. Run lsblk to find the current "/dev/sdX1" name of your LUKS-encrypted partition, as these are prone to change with each reboot.

2. Unlock the encrypted partition (change "/dev/sdX1" to the correct name from the previous step):

   cryptsetup open /dev/sdX1 my_crypt

   This will ask you for your password and then map the decrypted filesystem to /dev/mapper/my_crypt.

3. Make a temporary directory under /mnt as a mount point:

   mkdir /mnt/backups

4. Mount the decrypted filesystem:

   mount /dev/mapper/my_crypt /mnt/backups

   1. 🛑 If you have not already made a permanent directory to hold your Clonezilla images, do so now:

      mkdir /mnt/backups/clonezilla

      (It is good practice for this directory to be owned by root, since all of the images within it will be as well.)

5. Mount the images directory as /home/partimag:

   mount --bind /mnt/backups/clonezilla /home/partimag

   ℹ️ The bind parameter is required to mount one directory to another.

6. Run ls /home/partimag to list the contents of the directory and confirm everything worked.

7. Use the exit command to exit the shell and return to Clonezilla.

Success!

Now that you have returned to the menu system, you can proceed to create or restore a backup image as normal.

Multiple Jobs

When the backup or restore job is finished, the rerun2 option will allow you to start over and perform another -- all while keeping the current image repository at /home/partimag mounted.

⚠️ Be certain to use poweroff or reboot when you are finished, to safely shut down Clonezilla.