Clonezilla is a console based partition or disk clone software similar to Symantec Ghost Corporate. It saves and restores only used blocks on the hard drive.
Clonezilla is based on DRBL, Partimage, ntfsclone, and udpcast. It allows users to do ‘bare metal’ backup and recovery. Bare metal recovery is the process of rebuilding a computer after a catastrophic failure.
Two versions of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore, whereas Clonezilla server edition is designed for massive deployment, as it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. For example, you can clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.
Key Features
- Save Hark Disk Drive (HDD) image:
- HDD to a different, local HDD.
- HDD to a different, external HDD.
- Save partition:
- Partition to partition saving.
- Partition Hacks (Reroute to where partitions are restored).
- Image distribution via network or storage medium:
- HDD to a different, networked HDD.
- Partition to a different, networked partition (via ssh, cifs, samba, or other).
- Filesystems supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. You can therefore clone Linux or MS Windows. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
- LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under Linux.
- Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, which is suitable for massive cloning. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
- Based on Partimage, ntfsclone and dd to clone partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
- By using another free software drbl-winroll, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
Website: www.clonezilla.org
Support: Mailing Lists
Developer: Spiros Georgaras
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Clonezilla is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Disk Cloning Software | |
|---|---|
| GParted | Industrial-strength package for partition editing |
| Clonezilla | Perform system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery |
| Rescuezilla | Easy Backup, Recovery & Bare Metal Restore |
| FOG | A cloning / imaging solution / rescue suite |
| G4L | ncurses-based hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tool |
| Mondo Rescue | Reliable, disaster recovery solution |
| FSArchiver | Save the contents of a filesystem to a compressed archive file |
| PING | Partimage Is Not Ghost |
| Partclone | Save and restore used blocks on a partition |
| Redo Rescue | Simple backup and recovery solution |
| Foxclone | Image backup, restore and clone tool |
| qt-fsarchiver | Frontend for fsarchiver to save/restore partitions, folders and MBR/GPT |
| Partimage | Stores partitions to a image file |
| dcfldd | Enhanced version of dd |
| Apart GTK | Partclone GUI |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| Backup Tools | |
|---|---|
| restic | Fast, efficient and secure backup software |
| Borg | Deduplicating backup software |
| Duplicity | Encrypted bandwidth-efficient backup |
| TimeShift | Takes regular incremental snapshots of the filesystem |
| Duplicati | Store encrypted backups online |
| bup | Backup a system based on the git packfile format |
| Déjà Dup | Hides the complexity of doing backups the Right Way |
| Bacula | Network backup, recovery and verification |
| Kopia | Secure backup/restore tool that allows you to create encrypted snapshots |
| Clonezilla | Offers similar functionality to Symantec Ghost |
| Bareos | Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced |
| rsync | Fast remote file copy program |
| BackupPC | High-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up PCs |
| Vorta | Desktop client for Borg Backup |
| Backrest | Web UI and orchestrator for restic backup |
| Back in Time | Equivalent of OS X's Time Machine |
| UrBackup | Easy to setup open source client/server backup system |
| Rescuezilla | Easy backup, recovery & bare metal restore |
| Mondo Rescue | A powerful disaster recovery suite |
| KBackup | Backup program targeted at non-computer experts |
| rsnapshot | Local and remote filesystem snapshot utility |
| Amanda | Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver |
| FOG | Cloning / imaging solution / rescue suite |
| Partclone | Provides utilities to save and restore used blocks on a partition |
| XtraBackup | Backup tool for InnoDB and XtraDB databases |
| Plakar | Scalable backup solution |
| kup | Backup scheduler for the Plasma desktop |
| BURP | Uses librsync to save network traffic and space |
| Btrbk | Backup tool for btrfs subvolumes |
| Pika Backup | App focused on backups of personal data |
| PING | Also offers similar functionality to Symantec Ghost |
| dar | Full featured archiver with support for differential backups |
| tar | Tar archiving utility |
| Cedar Backup | Local and remote backups to CD or DVD media |
| shallow-backup | Git-integrated backup tool |
| ArchiveKeep | Keeps your files archived in multiple places |
| ZnapZend | ZFS centric backup tool |
| Vykar | Fast, encrypted, deduplicated backups in Rust |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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