Disk & Partition Imaging: Backup & Restore 💾¶

Whether you are about to flash an experimental custom ROM, repartition your MicroSD card, or preserve an exact clone of a bootable drive, creating a bit-for-bit raw image (.img) is the ultimate safety net.

fparted features a high-speed native C/JNI Direct I/O imaging engine capable of streaming hundreds of megabytes per second directly to internal storage, external SSDs, or network-attached shares via Android's Storage Access Framework (SAF).

1. Backing Up a Whole Disk to `.img`¶

A whole-disk backup captures the partition table (GPT/MBR), all partition slices, bootloaders, and every filesystem in a single raw image file.

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Dump Whole Disk: /dev/block/mmcblk1 (128.0 GiB)                       │
│                                                                        │
│  Destination: [ /storage/emulated/0/Backups/sdcard_backup.img ] [Browse]│
│  Block Buffer Size: [ 4 MiB (Direct I/O) ▼ ]                           │
│                                                                        │
│  Estimated Image Size: 128.038.100.992 bytes (119.24 GiB)              │
│  Available Free Space at Destination: 245.8 GiB (Sufficient)           │
│                                                  [ Cancel ]   [ Dump ] │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Step-by-Step¶

Select your target disk in the left navigation rail.
In the Drive Properties pane, tap Dump Whole Disk (or press Ctrl + Shift + D).
The Android Storage Access Framework (SAF) folder picker will appear:
Browse to your preferred backup location (e.g. Internal Storage > Backups or an attached external USB drive).
Enter your backup filename (e.g. sandisk_128gb_full_backup.img).
Tap Use this folder / Save.
Tap Dump to start streaming.
The live progress screen displays:
Current read speed (e.g., 92.4 MiB/s).
Processed gigabytes and percentage complete.
Real-time estimated time remaining (ETA).
When finished, fparted issues an explicit kernel fsync() to ensure all bytes are physically committed to flash storage.

2. Backing Up an Individual Partition¶

If you only need to back up a specific partition (such as your phone's boot, recovery, or vendor partition):

Select the specific partition in the partition list or visual graph.
Tap Backup Partition (or right-click / context menu).
Select your target destination folder and filename (e.g. boot_a_backup.img).
Tap Start Backup. fparted copies only the sectors belonging to that exact partition slice.

3. Cloning Partitions (Copy & Paste)¶

You can clone a partition directly from one location to another (either on the same drive or across different physical disks):

flowchart LR
    A["Select Source Partition"] -->|Ctrl + C| B["Copy to Clipboard"]
    B --> C["Select Target Unallocated Space"]
    C -->|Ctrl + V| D["Paste Partition"]
    D --> E["Smart Sparse Copy Engine (e2image / Direct I/O)"]

Select the source partition and tap Copy (or press Ctrl + C).
Select an unallocated free space region on the target disk and tap Paste (or press Ctrl + V).
Smart Sparse Cloning:
For ext4 partitions, fparted utilizes e2image to copy only populated data blocks, automatically skipping empty sectors. A 64 GiB ext4 partition with only 4 GiB of used files will clone in seconds instead of minutes!
For other filesystems, a direct block copier clones the partition with 4 MiB buffer pipelining.
Tap OK to stage the clone operation into your queue.

4. Restoring an Image to a Partition / Disk¶

To flash a previously created .img file back onto a partition:

Select the destination partition (ensure it is unmounted).
Tap Restore Image from the partition actions menu.
Select your source .img file in the SAF file picker.
Review the confirmation prompt (which displays the source image size and destination partition capacity).
Confirm and apply.

[!CAUTION] Restoring an image completely overwrites all data on the target partition. Make sure you are restoring to the correct partition slice!