3. Features of Clonezilla
* Free (GPL) Software.
* Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, and FAT, NTFS of M$ Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or M$ windows. For other file system, Clonezilla uses dd to dump the whole partition.
* LVM2 under GNU/Linux is supported.
* Multicast is supported in PXEBoot Clonezilla, which is suitalbe 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.
* UnlikePartimage or ntfsclone, which only for partitions. Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
* Unlike G4U or G4L, in Clonezilla, if file system is supported (ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, fat, ntfs), only used blocks in harddisk are saved and restored. This increase the clone efficiency. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
* By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned M$ windows machine can be automatically changed.
* A single machine clone system without installation, Clonezilla live, is also available.
4. About Clonezilla
You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting! With DRBL and network boot enabled client computers, the only thing you have to prepare is a Clonezilla server. You do not even have to prepare a bootable CD or floppy with Partition Image for every client computer.
Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you can massively clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Unlike G4U (Ghost for Unix) or G4L (Ghost for Linux), Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone effiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took about 50 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via unicasting and only about 10 minutes via multicasting!
A DRBL server must first be set up in order to use Clonezilla to do massively clone. On the other hand, if you do NOT want to install DRBL, just need clonezilla to clone individual machine, i.e. not massively clone, then you can try Clonnezilla Live, which allows you to use CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run clonezilla. The DRBL installation documentation is here. Once DRBL is installed on the server, Clonezilla is ready. Before downloading or installing clonezilla, it is recommended to read the "Change log" for different branches: stable, testing, unstable.
When setting up the DRBL server, it is recommended to collect the MAC addresses of the client computers and let the DRBL server offer the same IP address for the clients every time it boots. This will keep you from cloning the system to incorrect or unknown clients. Besides, if you do not provide the static IP address to client, as mentioned previously, different operating systems (like GNU/Linux and M$ windows), they use different DHCP client ID. Therefore even it's the same client, when it boots GNU/Linux via DRBL, it will leases one IP address, then next time when it boots into local M$ windows, it will lease another different IP address. This is annoying sometimes. However, if you are 100% certain that no other computer will be involved in the DRBL environment, and you do not care about the different IP address leasing problem, you can use the range in dhcpd.conf. In this case, you can even use the "impatient method" to setup the DRBL environment.
