Which Operating Systems and Image Formats Does Rescuezilla Support?

Rescuezilla supports backing up and restoring Windows, Mac, and Linux machines, and it is fully interoperable with images made by Clonezilla. It also supports images created by VirtualBox, VMware, Qemu, and all known open-source imaging frontends, and you can mount a supported image to copy files out of it (a beta feature). The practical condition is that you boot Rescuezilla from a USB stick or CD-ROM rather than installing it, so support is about the machines and images it can read and write, not about running it inside your normal operating system.

Operating systems you can back up and restore

According to the project, Rescuezilla saves and restores Windows, Mac, and Linux machines. The source puts it plainly: "It does not matter if you use Windows, Mac or Linux. It doesn't matter if you can't even login."

That last point matters for recovery. Because Rescuezilla runs from a live USB, it can operate on a machine whose regular operating system will not boot. You download the ISO, write it to a USB stick, and reboot. The computer loads a complete mini operating system with a point-and-click interface into memory without writing any information to your hard drive.

So the support question is not "which OS am I running Rescuezilla on" — it is "which OS is on the disk I want to image or restore." For that, the answer covers the three major desktop families.

Image formats and sources

Rescuezilla is described as fully compatible with Clonezilla, which the project calls the industry-standard trusted by tens of millions. It is positioned as the Clonezilla GUI, but the source stresses it is more than that.

Beyond Clonezilla images, Rescuezilla supports images made by:

• VirtualBox
• VMware
• Qemu
• All known open-source imaging frontends, including Clonezilla

This interoperability is the main reason to choose Rescuezilla over a narrower tool: if you already have images from one of these sources, you can work with them through a graphical interface instead of the command line.

Mounting an image to copy files out

Rescuezilla can easily mount any supported image and copy out your files. The source marks this as a beta feature, so treat it as usable but still in development. This is useful when you do not want a full restore — for example, when you only need to recover deleted pictures, documents, and other files, or when you cannot log in to the original system and just want to pull data off the image.

What you need to run it

• A USB stick or CD-ROM to write the ISO to. No installation is needed.
• The machine you want to back up or restore, which can be Windows, Mac, or Linux.
• Enough external storage to hold the image, since disk imaging stores the backup as files on an external hard drive.

The current download listed on the site is Version 2.6.2, released 2026-05-15. The project is GPL open source and was forked from Redo Backup and Recovery (now Redo Rescue) after that project had been abandoned for seven years; Rescuezilla was rebuilt from the ground up for Clonezilla compatibility.

Choosing based on your situation

• If your images come from Clonezilla, VirtualBox, VMware, or Qemu, Rescuezilla can work with them directly.
• If the machine will not boot or you cannot log in, Rescuezilla is built for exactly that case, since it runs from live media.
• If you only need a few files rather than a full restore, use the mount-and-copy feature, keeping in mind it is beta.
• If you need to confirm a specific image variant or a newer format not listed here, check the project's own documentation before relying on it, since the source only names the sources above.