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CloneZilla Live is a Live CD that allows the cloning of our disk and / or partitions. This can be very useful, either to do backup of that or for clone multiple machines with the same configuration (procedure that is very common in many companies to save time). |
Clonezilla Live
Clonezilla Live allows users to clone an individual machine, partition or disk to be played on another medium. The cloning can be saved as an image file or as an exact copy of data. The data can be saved locally, on an SSH server, Samba server, or an NFS file share and then restored at a later date. The software can be run from either a USB flash drive or CD / DVD boot.
Clonezilla Server
Clonezilla Server is used to simultaneously clone many computers over a network. This is done using a DRBL server and workstations that can boot from a network.
Clonezilla main features
- Free (GPL) Software.
- Supported file systems: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU / Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS + of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD , NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Thus, Clonezilla can clone GNU / Linux, MS windows, Mac OS (Intel-based), FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD systems, regardless of whether they are 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64). For these systems, only the used blocks are cloned. For other unsupported file systems, sector-by-sector cloning is possible, but complete.
- Support for LVM2 under GNU / Linux.
- Grub support (1 and 2).
- Support for multicast, which is very useful when cloning systems in bulk.
- You can rely on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to create the image or clone a partition. However, it is also possible to clone entire disks and not just separate partitions.
- Using drbl-winroll it is possible to automatically change the server name, group and SID of the cloned Win system.
The cloning process
At cloning process will ask us several questions which are basically the options we have in the program, some of these are:
Clone Type Options:
- Device-to-image copy: both backup and restore backup.
- Device-to-device copy: we can clone an entire disk or just a partition of it.
Directory options, or basically from where or where we will restore / store our backup:
- Local machine: either an internal or external hard drive.
- SSH server.
- Samba server.
- NFS server.
Compression options or how we want the image of our disk to be compressed:
- Gzip compression: fast but image somewhat smaller than the real one.
- Bzip2 compression: the slowest but at the same time the most compressed.
- Lzo compression: faster than gzip and similar in size.
- Without compression: obviously the fastest but also the one that will occupy us the most.
Sources: Clonezilla & Engadget & Wikipedia
I tried it a while ago, however, it takes a long time to start ... I only tried it twice ... I should try again ...
and I agree with Mark ... Norton Ghost is dead ... even so many use it because they only want to do a total dump from one disk to another ... but Acronis I think that for the moment it is the most appropriate ...
The article is really interesting, I already see it using it in virtual machines where you want to clone those virtual disks and pass them from VirtualPC to VirtualBox or VMWare or vice versa, etc.
Interesting comments, I'm going to test it on a macbook pro if I can clone 3 out of 5 partitions to another hard drive.
Mark: If you are a publicist for Acronis… you look bad.
Clonezilla is excellent. It has a very good creation and recovery speed. I recently read that you have an option to create iso images. Then you could build an iso with the image of your partition and make it self-extracting, without first booting the clonezilla cd and then looking for the image in another unit. I don't know if they have already tried it ...
AHA! Interesting!
Honestly, Norton Ghost is dead. It's been * many * years since I personally stopped using it in favor of other, much more powerful solutions.
Currently the solution I use is Acronis, for the company I work for I can use the network management versions (in addition to local) for both servers and workstations and I find it a very complete program (eg compatibility with Shadow MS copy, incremental and differential copies, deduplication, ...).
We evaluated Clonezilla when choosing the backup solution but it did not fit our needs. Mostly because it did not allow creating incremental / differential copies, but neither did it allow mounting and / or accessing the images.
It's an interesting project, but it still has a long way to go in my opinion.
According to their website, the incremental copy functionality is not yet implemented.
does this clonezilla work better than Redo Backup?
Thank you
I have been using it for years and for me it is totally valid for what I use it. I only see one defect, and that is that when you clone a disk you cannot adjust the size of the partitions like in Norton Ghost. You always have to use a disk equal to or greater than the one you made the image on.
As for filesystems say that it recognizes everything (from what I have tried).
A question Is there any non-free alternative that recognizes the partitions in Ext4 and allows resizing?
All the best
Hi Lelillo! Look, I don't know of any, but many blog readers have recommended Acronis. You should check it out!
Cheers! Paul.
Yes, the Acronis Backup & Recovery branch in its latest build (# 12497) recognizes and handles Ext4 correctly, but Acronis solutions are neither free nor free.
A Backup & Recovery Workstation license costs around € 70 more or less.
Ignorant's Question: Does it allow incremental copies?
A great tool without a doubt.
Heh, I'm ……… Velasquez.
or just krafty.