Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery. Three types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live, Clonezilla lite server, and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla lite server or SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk. This increases the clone efficiency. With some high-end hardware in a 42-node cluster, a multicast restoring at rate 8 GB/min was reported.
Features
- Free (GPL) Software.
- Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, 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.
- Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
- Unattended mode is supported. Almost all steps can be done via commands and options. You can also use a lot of boot parameters to customize your own imaging and cloning.
- 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.
- The image file can be on local disk, ssh server, samba server, or NFS server.
- Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a 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.
Minimum System Requirements for Clonezilla live:
- X86 or x86-64 processor
- 196 MB of system memory (RAM)
- Boot device, e.g. CD/DVD Drive, USB port, PXE, or hard drive
Limitations:
- The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
- Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet.
- Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
- Software RAID/fake RAID is not supported by default. It’s can be done manually only.
- Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can NOT recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this.
- Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file.
License:
Clonezilla itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2. However, to run Clonezilla, a lot of free and open source software, e.g. the Linux kernel, a mininal GNU/Linux OS, are required.
What’s New
Enhancements and Changes from 3.0.3-22
- The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2023/Apr/26).
- Linux kernel was updated to 6.1.25-1.
- Package ezio was updated to 2.0.1-1. The corresponding changes to Clonezilla have been done.
- Program makeboot.sh: make it run only in x86 arch.
- Include packages dvtm & dtach.
- Memtest86+ was updated to v6.10.
- If block dev has a file system found in the image when restoring, treat it as a partition.
- ocs-sr: if /dev/md* exists, list both disk and parts in TUI, and disable devices list cache mechanism.
- ocs-onthefly: disable devices list cache mechanism if /dev/md* exists.
- Add option “-K” (–ignoreactivationskip) to vgchange so that snapshots can be dealed with. Thanks to Felipe Piero Benjamin Solari Agüela (fsolari at pucp.edu.pe) for suggesting this.
- Functions check_if_disk_busy and is_partition of ocs-functions were improved. Fake/firmware RAID support should be improved. Thanks to Michael McGrath. Ref: https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Open_discussion/thread/8627eabf99/?limit=25&page=1#9b16/b174
Bug Fixes
- Invalid dialog options for ‘-p’ option. Ref: https://github.com/stevenshiau/drbl/pull/27
- ocs-cvtimg-comp: Suppress the syntax error about size when dd image is converted. Rename the existing destination image name if it exists. Ref: https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/discussion/Help/thread/e182121ea0
- Devices list cache failed to disabled. If use_dev_list_cache is set as no, then check_if_use_disklist_cache and check_if_use_partlist_cache in ocs-functions should not create any cache info.
- Remove extra “stop” in parameters when stopping lighttpd.*
