Norton Ghost and its open source alternative Partition Image have been the software to go to for cloning hard drives for some time now. Today we’re look at a further alternative that the open source world has to offer – Clonezilla…

Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone tool similar to Norton Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive.. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live : It is suitable for single machine backup and restore.

This tutorial shows how you can back up and restore hard drives and partitions with CloneZilla Live. CloneZilla Live is a Linux Live-CD that you insert into your computer; it contains hard disk and partition imaging and cloning tools similar to Norton Ghost.

Some hard drive cloning programs support a wide variety of filesystems. Some can create image files and store only the sectors that are actually in use. Some can clone over a network, and a few can multicast a drive or image file to multiple targets simultaneously. Clonezilla can do all of the above, with the added benefit of being free.

Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work -- until you've tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands.

Clonezilla is a bootable CDROM designed for partition backup and restoration. Unlike SystemRescueCD, Clonezilla Live doesn't contain an array of utilities, rather it is a single, focused tool.

Clonezilla is a Ncurses-based front-end to a set of scripts that use several open source disk utilities such as Partimage, ntfsclone, Partclone and dd. It'll jump at your command and duplicate particular partitions, or better still complete disks. It'll also restore the partitions, and help you mirror an old disk onto a bigger new disk.

"Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 1.2.1-17, a Debian-based live CD designed for hard disk cloning and partitioning tasks: ..."

At work we need to image laptops. We do that with clonezilla. But some people think the clonezilla menu ias to hard. So A colleague and I made a script to do it in 2 steps (mount and enter image name). But that had to be integrated in to the clonezilla live CD. That is a pain to do if you're on a windows vista PC. But it worked, and I wanted to share it with the rest of the world.