Clonezilla

Definition - What does Clonezilla mean?

Clonezilla is a free software program designed to perform disaster recovery, disk cloning, disk imaging and deployment. It is an open-source clone system solution that comes in unicasting and multicasting versions. It is similar to Norton Ghost and Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk to increase its cloning efficiency.

Techopedia explains Clonezilla

Clonezilla creates a copy of the contents of a computer’s hard drive on another storage device and enables users to do backup and recovery on their personal computers. Clonezilla has two types:

  • Clonezilla Live: This unicasting version is adequate for doing a backup and restore on a single computer.
  • Clonezilla SE: This multicasting version is Clonezilla's server edition, and is suitable for doing a backup and restore for many computers simultaneously. It can clone more than 40 computers at the same time.

Some of Clonezilla’s features include

  • It is available free of charge
  • It supports many file systems, allowing it to clone GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems
  • Clonezilla SE supports multicast, which can be used for cloning many computers at once. It can also be used remotely to save or restore a number of computers.

Clonezilla also has some limitations:

  • The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
  • Differential/incremental backup is not yet implemented.
  • Online imaging/cloning is not yet implemented. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
  • In order to create an ISO recovery file, all the files have to be on one CD or DVD.

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