Clonezilla is a suite of open source drive cloning, drive imaging and system deployment utilities used to simplify deployment and

maintenance Maintenance may refer to: Biological science * Maintenance of an organism * Maintenance respiration Non-technical maintenance * Alimony, also called ''maintenance'' in British English * Champerty and maintenance, two related legal doct ...

of a group of computers. Clonezilla Server Edition uses

multicast In computer networking, multicast is group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast should not be confused with ...

technologies to deploy a single image file to a group of computers on a

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, school, laboratory, university campus or office building. By contrast, a wide area network (WAN) not only covers a larger ...

. Clonezilla was designed by Steven Shiau and developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

. Clonezilla is used to deploy

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

s to computers by imaging a single computer and then deploying that image to one or more systems. It integrates several other open-source programs to provide cloning and imaging capabilities.

Variants

Clonezilla works by copying used blocks on the storage device (i.e. SATA SSD, HDD or NVMe SSD). It is intended to support a

bare-metal In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system. Modern operating systems evolved through various stages, from elementary to the pre ...

deployment of an operating systems by booting from a preinstalled live environment. The preinstallation environment can be booted from a

USB flash drive Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply ( interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A bro ...

, CD/DVD-ROM or Android mobile phone. It uses Partclone, Ntfsclone and

Partimage Partimage is a disk cloning utility for Linux/UNIX environments. Partimage can save partitions in many formats to a disk image. Utilities such as Partimage are useful in a number of situations which are commonly encountered by network administrato ...

to image the drive either over the network or to a locally-attached hard disk drive. There are two variants of Clonezilla: Clonezilla Live is intended to be used for imaging a single computer, while Clonezilla Server Edition (SE) is intended for mass deployment over a

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

Clonezilla Live

Clonezilla process of cloning from disk to disk

Clonezilla Live can image a single computer's storage media or a single partition on the media to an image file stored on a

SSH server An SSH server is a software program which uses the Secure Shell protocol to accept connections from remote computers. SFTP/SCP file transfers and remote terminal connections are popular use cases for an SSH server. General Platform The ope ...

, Samba network share, locally-attached hard disk drive or to a network filesystem file-share. Alternatively, Clonezilla Live can clone the data on one storage medium to another without the need to create an image file first. Image files can be deployed to the same or different computers as required. Unlike

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (previously known as Acronis True Image) is a software package produced by Acronis International GmbH that aims to protect the system from ransomware and allows users to backup and restore files or entire systems ...

and

Norton Ghost Ghost (an acronym for ''general hardware-oriented system transfer'') is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec. The backup and recove ...

, Clonezilla lacks an agent that can be installed into the operating system. Instead, Clonezilla was designed under the assumption that the disk should be cloned without interfering with the operating system. It is booted from a preinstallation environment and operations are performed within a consistent environment.

Clonezilla Server Edition (SE)

Clonezilla Server Edition (SE) can clone many computers at the same time using multicast technology over a

. Multicast support is provided by UDPCast tool. Since such an environment is difficult to configure, users can download a Live disk that provides the operating system with all the necessary configurations already done. Images are uploaded to an image repository configured by the user, which may be a local directory on the same server as Clonezilla SE or a remote location such as a

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the tech ...

that is accessed using

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH applications are based on ...

or Samba.

Effectiveness

Clonezilla is an effective tool for deploying software in training laboratories. Clonezilla can sometimes be faster than proprietary solutions (i.e.

, DriveImage XML, Macrium Reflect, and Active Disk Image) for both full image backup and restoration but can be difficult to configure. Clonezilla lacks incremental and differential backup support (which may make deployment slower).

Features

Filesystem copying

Clonezilla uses information from the filesystem to determine which blocks on a drive require copying. This ensures that only the space currently in use on the drive is copied while empty space is ignored. Clonezilla supports several filesystems including: Linux-based filesystems (

Ext2 The ext2 or second extended file system is a file system for the Linux kernel. It was initially designed by French software developer Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed according to the same ...

Ext3 ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaled file system that is commonly used by the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions. Stephen Tweedie first revealed that he was working on ext ...

Ext4 ext4 (fourth extended filesystem) is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3. ext4 was initially a series of backward-compatible extensions to ext3, many of them originally developed by Cluster File Systems for ...

ReiserFS ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaling file system initially designed and implemented by a team at Namesys led by Hans Reiser and licensed under GPLv2. Introduced in version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel, it was the first journaling file sys ...

XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; as ...

, JFS and

Btrfs Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or simply by spelling it out) is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (not to be confused ...

); Windows (

NTFS New Technology File System (NTFS) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It superseded File Allocation Table (FAT) as the preferred fil ...

and

FAT In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers specifically to triglycerides (triple est ...

); LVM2 and some hardware

RAID Raid, RAID or Raids may refer to: Attack * Raid (military), a sudden attack behind the enemy's lines without the intention of holding ground * Corporate raid, a type of hostile takeover in business * Panty raid, a prankish raid by male college ...

chip sets. When an unsupported filesystem is imaged or cloned, Clonezilla falls back to copying the data using dd. The master boot record and other drive metadata is copied using dd by Clonezilla before using PartClone, PartImage or NtfsClone to copy the appropriate filesystem.

Compression

Clonezilla images can be split into smaller files and compressed to save space on the destination drive.

PXE booting

Clonezilla can be booted over a

using PXE booting techniques.

References

External links

* *
Rescuezilla
is an open-source disk imaging app with a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

that is fully compatible with Clonezilla. {{Backup software Backup software for Linux Cross-platform software Disk cloning Free backup software Free data recovery software Free software programmed in Perl Free system software Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media