Clonezilla, here to stay, not fade away!*

Now that I've downloaded it and started testing it, I'm really impressed with Clonezilla. Running as a “Linux live CD” iso image just over 100 megabytes large, one method touted is to operate it on a USB drive pen. Since all the test-victims in-house have CDROM/DVD Rom drives, I tested it purely as a CDROM image and it works exactly as advertised. Since I have tried booting a Linux “Live CDROM” off a USB drive before, I didn't think it would be much of an issue. But I will be testing it that way soon.

There are multiple file formats supported. FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2 and ext3 all were listed and that sold me right off. Drive-to-drive, partition-to-image, drive-to-image, multi-cast and peer-to-peer-casting and probably a couple other methods that I missed are all possible.

I tried booting up the CDROM image on 4 different computers with 4 different NICs and all netted up without any issues. I used a Linksys router as a DHCP server for IP addresses et al and it worked each time without a hitch. It also accepts multi-cast DHCP addresses from a Linux server.

Debbietoo served as the server/target of the Clonezilla distro (http://www.clonezilla.org/) booted up on both paqman (old P3 Compaq Enpro with Ubuntu 9.04) and the Windows XP Pro box (P4) and got viable clones out of both of them. There is a script that gets made as part of the process that can be used for the same cloning operation at another time, but I haven't tried copying it from the RAM image to debbietoo for future use.

I've been using the Clonezilla CDROM iso as the boot disk to make the clones manually. The best trick would be to host the iso in a separate partition on each of the systems you want to clone and have a way to trigger a reboot into that partition at a specified time. Cron and at on the Linux and Windows systems would work for the scheduling. The rest could be handled by writing or renaming some files to cause them to be executed on the reboot. As long as you have enough drive space for the images, this could give you a way to do a full “backup” without user intervention required.

Automatic clones of system drives has been something I've wanted to do for some time now. It just never percolated up to the top of the “to-do” stack. Its at the top now. My son's Windows XP Pro box has become practically unusable AGAIN. I've spent a lot of time copying and cleaning drive space. His computer is not going back onto the Internet before I get a clone of the clean system so I can just “drop” it back onto the C drive and reboot. Clonezilla looks a lot like the tool I need to do it.

The interface is not as “clean” as Norton Ghost but it also doesn't have the dozens of command line options of Norton that allow for scripting but make it almost impossible to use right away. Most of the options are text menu driven so it is easier to use.

In the compression department, it doesn't use a proprietary scheme so single files can be extracted using the gzip or other zip type utility.

The image itself becomes a folder with files inside it. The bulk of the image becomes a single compressed file, or a series of sections sized by user's choice in the compression choice made by the user. Some are heavily compressed but slow but one option is no compression at all, which of course is the fastest. Going from Debian 4.0 on a Celeron server 2.4 GHz (debbietoo) to a Windows XP Home edition bare metal restore on a P4 1.2 GHz took an hour and a half over an Ethernet 100TX copper connection. The original image was over 33GB.

II haven't tested the entire feature set yet of Clonezilla but already its a keeper.

* a rip from Buddy Holly