How to Get Started with Rescuezilla from a USB Stick

Rescuezilla boots from a USB stick and runs entirely in your computer's memory, so you can back up, restore, or recover a disk without installing anything to your hard drive. This works whether the machine runs Windows, Mac, or Linux, and even if you can't boot into or log in to your normal operating system. The steps below cover downloading the ISO, writing it to USB, booting from it, and running your first backup or restore.

What you need before you start

• A USB stick large enough to hold the Rescuezilla ISO (the current release is Version 2.6.2, released 2026-05-15).
• A separate external hard drive to store your disk images. Rescuezilla saves the backup as files on external storage, not on the drive being imaged.
• A way to write an ISO to USB from a working computer (the Rescuezilla site links to download and help pages for this).
• The target machine set to boot from USB, which usually means changing the boot order in its firmware/BIOS settings.

Step 1: Download the ISO

Go to the Rescuezilla download page and get Version 2.6.2. The project is open source under GPL, and the site describes it as free to use. The download page is the authoritative source for the current version and any checksums, so use it rather than a mirror.

Step 2: Write the ISO to your USB stick

Use any standard ISO-to-USB writing tool to put the downloaded image onto the stick. Rescuezilla does not need to be installed — it runs from the USB stick or a CD-ROM. Once the write finishes, you have a bootable drive.

Step 3: Boot the target machine from USB

1. Insert the USB stick into the machine you want to back up or restore.
2. Reboot and enter the boot menu or firmware settings to select the USB device.
3. The computer loads a complete mini operating system with a point-and-click interface into memory. Per the project, this writes no information to your hard drive, so the machine's existing data is left untouched at this stage.

If the machine won't boot from USB, check that the USB entry is enabled and first in boot order, and that the stick was written correctly.

Step 4: Run a backup, restore, or recovery

Once the graphical desktop loads, you point and click through the imaging actions:

• Backup: create a disk image of the whole computer and store it as files on your external hard drive.
• Restore: if a drive fails, restore the image and your documents and settings return to the exact state they were in when the snapshot was taken, typically within a few minutes.
• Recovery: mount a supported image and copy individual files out — useful for recovering deleted pictures, documents, and other files, or for accessing files when you can't log in.

Rescuezilla is fully interoperable with Clonezilla, so images it creates can be used with Clonezilla and vice versa. It also supports images made by VirtualBox, VMware, Qemu, and other open-source imaging frontends, which means you can restore a virtual machine image onto real hardware or the reverse.

Key things to know

Common snags

• USB not detected at boot: re-check boot order and re-write the ISO.
• No external drive for images: you need separate storage; the image can't live on the drive being imaged.
• Expecting an installed app: Rescuezilla is a live environment, not a program you run from inside your normal OS.

The project is a fork of Redo Backup and Recovery (now Redo Rescue), rebuilt from the ground up for full Clonezilla compatibility after the original was abandoned for seven years. If you want to support it, the site suggests liking it on AlternativeTo or posting a review so more people find it.