Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition).
Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore.
While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40
plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only
used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At
the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers
simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes
system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!
Features of Clonezilla
- Free (GPL) Software.
- Filesystem supported:
ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS
Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS
windows and Intel-based Mac OS, no matter it’s 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit
(x86-64) OS. 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 GNU/Linux is supported.
- Multicast
is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone.
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, partclone,
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, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
