I’m Buster and I’ve got a quick review of Open Source and freeware . This week’s Open Source pick is Clonezilla.
Clonezilla, based on DRBL, 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 hard disk. This increases the clone efficiency.
Features:
• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: (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. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, 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.
Limitations
• The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
• Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet.
• Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
• Software RAID/fake RAID is not supported by default. It can be done manually only.
• Due to the image format limitation, the image cannot be explored or mounted. You can _NOT_ recovery single file from the image.
• Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file.
Which Clonezilla Shall I Use ?
• Clonezilla Live: Clonezilla live allows you to use CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run clonezilla (Unicast only)
• Clonezilla SE: Clonezilla SE is included in DRBL, therefore a DRBL server must first be set up in order to use Clonezilla to do massively clone (unicast, broadcast and multicast are supported).
The best way to run the SE edition would require a server and Linux would be the easiest but for the home user Clonezilla Live is great for making drive images which can be restored quickly and easily.
It works on Intel Macs and Windows so why buy a commercial product when your Mac and PC can both be imaged quickly and safely with Clonezilla. If you use it, don’t forget to donate.
Tags: clonezilla, cloning, freeware, open source, Software
I’ve used Clonezilla for years and it works great. The thing that’s most useful is its support for so many different filesystems (since it’s Linux-based). Users of Norton Ghost will probably notice it doesn’t have the nice pretty GUI, but it does what it is supposed to do, and does it well.