Free ghost – cloning software for linux using clonezilla

If you ever heard about Norton Ghost for Windows, you will be familiar with this open source software. Clonezilla is an open source software that will help you to backup, clone, restore or “ghost’” your harddisk or your Operating System. There are two version of Clonezilla, its Clonezilla Server and Clonezilla Live. This software can be an alternative of Norton Ghost. And with Clonezilla you can clone your Windows or Linux System easily.

The Live edititon is good for single computer and personal use, and the SE is best for office with many computers sharing on single server. Both versions are very efficient due to the fact that they restore and save only those blocks in the hard disk that are actually used. And both versions are surprisingly quick. For more information, please visit the Clonezilla Developer’s website.

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.

Download Clonezilla