partclone.ntfs backup takes just a few seconds and still reports success

[shasheene]

Hi Thomas,

I develop Rescuezilla, a Clonezilla GUI.

A user of mine has found their NTFS partition (with 465GB capacity with 40GB of files) only takes 2 seconds to backup.

I investigated the Rescuezilla log files they provided and partclone itself reported success:

Backup /dev/sda2 containing filesystem ntfs to /mnt/backup/RZ_Backup/2022-05-13-1335-img-rescuezilla/sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.uncomp.
Running: partclone.ntfs --logfile /var/log/partclone.log --clone --source /dev/sda2 --output - | cat - | split --suffix-length=2 --bytes=4GB - /mnt/backup/RZ_Backup/2022-05-13-1335-img-rescuezilla/sda2.ntfs-ptcl-img.uncomp. 
Partclone v0.3.13 http://partclone.org
Starting to clone device (/dev/sda2) to image (-)
Reading Super Block
Elapsed: 00:00:01, Remaining: 00:01:39, Completed:   1.00%
Elapsed: 00:00:01, Remaining: 00:00:00, Completed: 100.00%
Total Time: 00:00:01, 100.00% completed!
File system:  NTFS
Total Time: 00:00:02, Ave. Rate:    3.4GB/min, 100.00% completed!
Syncing... OK!
Partclone successfully cloned the device (/dev/sda2) to the image (-)

I recommended the user try Clonezilla, because Rescuezilla v2.3.1 uses its distro version of partclone v0.3.13.

The user tried my suggestion and was able to reproduce the issue on clonezilla-live-20220103-impish-amd64, which uses partclone v0.3.18.

I suspect there is a major bug in partclone NTFS that allows partitions to sometimes fail but report success.