Description
Partclone is a utility used for backing up and restoring partitions. Many cloning tools (such as Clonezilla) rely on it to create block-level images that include filesystem metadata.

References

• Partclone GitHub Repository
• Clonezilla Official Documentation

How to Craft

1. Install partclone (available in repositories for most Linux distros).
2. Run:

   sudo partclone.ext4 -c -s /dev/sda1 -o sda1.partclone

   to create an image of /dev/sda1.

Magic Value / Signature

• Partclone images typically start with ASCII partclone (8 bytes), followed by version info and metadata.

How to Extract / Decompress

• Tool: Use partclone itself to restore:

  sudo partclone.ext4 -r -s sda1.partclone -o /dev/sdb1

• Python Library: None widely used. Could potentially interface with libpartclone if available.

Determining End Offset

• The Partclone header contains fields for the total block count and block size.
• Multiply total_blocks by block_size and add the header length to find the complete image length.
• unblob should read and parse the header to determine the end of the image data.