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Starting my 3rd major IT job in the last 5 years, I find myself talking companies into investing into tools that I use on a regular basis time and time again.  Naturally, when I found out that my new employer did not have an imaging solution in place for me to use as a safety net prior to reconfiguring some critical server componants, I decided to go shopping.  This time however, what I found had a $0.00 price tag.

Clonezilla is available in two editions, Clonezilla live, and Clonezilla server.  Live is suitable for single machine backup and restores, and is completely self contained into one linux based bootable cd.  Clonezilla server edition can be used to clone multiple machines simutaneously (similar to Ghostcasts from Norton and Symantec’s products).

In my test environment, I was able to use Clonezilla server to image 4 machines at once (using multicast) with an image size of approx 6 GB.  The entire process took just over 12 minutes.

Check this great product (did I say that it was FREE?) here.

Features of Clonezilla

  • Free (GPL) Software.
  • Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/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 GNU/Linux is supported.
  • Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, 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 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.

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