Overview
Clonezilla is a free disaster recovery, disk cloning, disk imaging and deployment solution. Clonezilla is designed by Steven Shiau and developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan. Clonezilla Server Edition provides multicast support similar to Norton Ghost Corporate Edition.
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 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 and Benefits:
Clonezilla provides the following features and benefits:
- 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) VMFS3 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.
- LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
- Boot loader, including grub (version 1 and version 2) and syslinux, could be reinstalled.
- Unattended mode is supported. Almost all steps can be done via commands and options. You can also use a lot of boot parameters to customize your own imaging and cloning.
- 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.
- The image file can be on local disk, ssh server, samba server, or NFS server.
- Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a 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.
Download Clonezilla
Clonezilla 2.1.1-25 (Stable) is available for download at following website. Download the files appropriate for you:
New in Clonezilla 2.1.1-25
This build includes minor enhancements and bug fixes.
Enhancements and changes:
- Based on the Debian Sid repository (as of April 20, 2013).
- Linux kernel was updated to 3.2.41-2.
- Partclone was updated to 0.2.60.drbl1.
- The package drbl was updated to 2.3.28-drbl1, and clonezilla was updated to 3.3.40-drbl1.
- Sample file "custom-ocs-1" was updated.
- A Dialog menu is used in the final action of Clonezilla live.
- The MAC address of a network card will be shown when configuring the network settings
A full list of changes in this build is available in the Clonezilla - News
System Requirements for Clonezilla live:
- X86 or x86-64 processor
- 196 MB of system memory (RAM)
- Boot device, e.g. CD/DVD Drive, USB port, PXE, or hard drive
Limitations:
Clonezilla has the following 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/firmware RAID is not supported by default. It's can be done manually only.
- Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can _NOT_ recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this.
- 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.
References:
Wikipedia
Clonezilla.org
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