I was looking for an excellent cloning tool that can replace the Norton Ghost and Bart PE that I normally use. Because commerical software tends to have license restrictions (e.g. one license is required for each computer you are going to clone) yadda yadda... this makes things difficult requiring you to buy more and more licenses. Also compatibility with SATA and SCSI sometimes is a problem with Ghost bootdisks... Of course theres Acronis BUT I WANT SOMETHING TRUELY FREE TO DO CLONING OF MY HARDDISKS AND COMPUTERS... TO DO BARE METAL BACKUPS!!! ok.. released all that repressed frustration... as you might have guess there is a solution... readon...

I've tired a bunch of cloning software the paid ones are mostly pretty good particularly Acronis. The free disk cloning tools I tried were G4L, G4U, Gparted. The free ones were good as well accept for some minor hiccups here and there. But the guys who seem to have gotten it straight are these Taiwanese Chaps... They have created an exceptional tool for doing bare metalbackups or diskcloning. With support for SSH, NFS and Samba filesystems, saving or restoring to a network share and also usb external portable drives as well this is great!! The system also comes with a standalone boot CD.. And of course it clones NTFS disks too. I have attempted to clone a Dell SC440 server, and successfully recovered to the SCSI Raid array. So I find that it is pretty excellent. Driver support for devices is dependant on what ever Debian Etch supports as the CD is based on a Debian Etch distro.

Here are some screenshots:

 1. This is the Clonezilla boot screen when you first start off the software.

2. Various Clonezilla Options

 3. Choosing an option backup an entire drive or partition or restore.

 4. Clonezilla can image to NFS, Samba or local storage even usb hdds.

All in all Clonezilla does what it is supposed to do. It has simple menus, cross platform support. Save to USB storage or to a network drive. And is FREE as in GPL. It is simply put excellent. POINT TO TAKE NOTE: Best to use the clone entire disk option, if you are uncomfortable messing around with grub.

For it is just so excellent I just have to give it 5 cool smilies!!

NOT TO FORGET THE LINK AS WELL GET CLONEZILLA HERE

Comments (1)

	1. 23-07-2009 20:07
	Is there a way to verify that the image is intact? I have had several occasions with Acronis in which it wasn't. Fortunately, I always verify immeciately. Thanks Guest Report

Doug

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