CloneZilla - better than Norton Ghost

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You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

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.

Clonezilla

[begood]

Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 1.2.5-17, a new stable version of the specialist live CD designed for hard disk partitioning and cloning:

This release of Clonezilla live (1.2.5-17) includes major enhancements, changes and bug fixes.

MAJOR ENHANCEMENTS and CHANGES:

* This release was created by live-helper 2.0~a11-1drbl1, and live-initramfs 1.215.1-1drbl-1 is used.

* A version with pure AMD64 (X86-64) programs was created in this release. It can support large partition (e.g. 10 TB) imaging.

* The Linux kernel was updated to 2.6.32-12.

* Partclone was updated to 0.2.9. It has been reported that the speed of this version is much faster than the previous one.

* Package memtest86+ was updated to 4.10.

* Package syslinux was updated to 3.86.

* Package pbzip2 was updated to 1.1.1, and it's the default program for running bzip2 compression and decompression in parallel.

* Package gzrt was added.

* Boot parameter "nomodeset" was added with vga=normal to avoid using framebuffer mode in safe graphic mode.

BUG FIXES

* VGA failsafe mode was not working.

* A harmless warning message when running grub2 installation after Ubuntu Lucid is restored was fixed

* Suppress and avoid the error message when getting data from EDD.

* A NFS locking issue found in Clonezilla live 1.2.5-15 was fixed.

The release announcement.

Download (MD5):

clonezilla-live-1.2.5-17-i686.iso (118MB),

clonezilla-live-1.2.5-17-amd64.iso (131MB).