Saturday, June 9, 2007

CloneZilla: Open Source Disk Imaging

This has rapidly become my newest Cool Tool. Struggling with the Licensing of all the Symantec Stuff, I decided recently to begin looking for alternatives. Since we are using Mac / Wintel / Linux - I wanted to find a universal solution for ghosting / imaging computers.

http://www.clonezilla.org/

Clonezilla will image everything (according to it's webpage).

DISCLAIMER: do not read the page at the link above and freak out. That is the hard version of the software. The link you want to use to setup and create your own usb stick boot of Clonezilla is here: http://clonezilla.sourceforge.net/clonezilla-live/

If you follow the directions, you can create a USB stick that will boot up linux and walk you through the process of connecting to your server, and then allow you to dump / restore disk images.

I have tested this with my Windows Vista Laptop. I have both dumped an image of the entire system and restored it as well. Worked flawlessly.

What's better is that I did not have to do any driver configuration. I have been a long time user of BartPE for doing CD based booting of Windows and using Ghost32 for disk imaging, and Clonezilla boots MUCH faster, doesn't require the complicated rebuild process when I get a new machine, is as fast on the imaging end of things, and best of all IT'S FREE!

I hope to post some more tips for CloneZilla in the coming days. I am going to try to build a customized load where the server is automatically mapped, and maybe a custom menu.

That's all for now!

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah i was pretty much in the same situation as you, licensing issues, cost of multicasting software and i too tried clonezilla - i guess in time the developers will tidy up the interface as its a bit DOS like but i think being basic is what also makes it fast (like Ghost) - one thing to note though is that using clonezilla also means you need to generate a new SID (on Windows based clones)....havent tried it on linux or mac yet