Firstly nClone is a great disk imaging tool, once installed on your nas you can boot your PC and ghost/image the hdds from and to it.

So Synology released a new DSM and with it came new security. As per every previous version the great nClone utility that hasn’t seen an update since 2012 breaks, and it usually takes me a few days to get it working again. With DSM 6 I couldn’t get it to work. Luckily enough a french Synology forum user starlst has changed the code to get it working again. (Thanks starlst.).

You can download it from the french website (or below from my website)
Download: http://www.nas-forum.com/forum/files/file/604-nclone-beat-5-dsm6/
Thread: http://www.nas-forum.com/forum/topic/52192-package-nclone-pour-dsm6-fonctionnel/

Because we don’t all want to sign up to the forum and sometimes files disappear i have uploaded a copy below. Enjoy all.

nclone-free-beta6-DSM6.spk

January 2021 Update,

This has been working for years, however late 2020 I noticed an issue with nClone being unable to mount the SMB shares. After entering the password i would see the error “cifs_mount failed w/return code = -95” luckily this is a fairly easy fix.

It looks like a few minor updates ago they forced SMB version updates, due to this the CIFS mount fails after you enter your password after PXE booting (could be because of the aging nclone Linux version).

Until I get a newer version of clonezilla installed and tested you can do the following to fix the cifs mounting issue.

Use Putty and ssh into the Synology NAS.

  1. Navigate to the nclone location “cd /volume1/@appstore/nclone/public_html
  2. Edit the autorun-script.cgi as root “sudo vi autorun-script.cgi
  3. In Vi hit “insert” on the keyboard and navigate to the 13th line and after “user=admin” add “,vers=3.0
  4. Hit “ESC” on the keyboard and then type “:wq” to quit vi.
  5. The share should now mount after reloading nclone.