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.
Features include:
- 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.
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