I’ve talked about Clonezilla as a remarkably good an fast disk cloning utility previously, but there’s more to the clonezilla project than just rescue imaging of drives. There’s also a thin-boot server as well…. (diskless remote boot loader?) Anyway, This tutorial talks about how to setup clonezilla/drbl on a recent ubuntu install.
Tag: clonezilla
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Clonezilla
For quite a while I’ve used ghost4linux (g4l) for my disc cloning needs. What I REALLY like are the ability to do a network copy of the image to an ftp server and the built in dd_rescue to rescue data from a failing hard drive. Unfrotunately g4l does a bit by bit copy of a drive which means it can take a while and it copies the full drive capacity (say for instance 80GB) even if you only have 5GB worth of information. Now, it can be compressed and if you massage the drive by defraging/filling empty space with ones before you start you can squeeze the image down pretty small, but… sometimes that’s a big task (I remember leaving one box writing zeros to the drive overnight to prepare the empty space for a g4l cloning.) Anyway…. I’ve run across clonezilla recently and am VERY impressed – it’s basically a wrapper around partimage – it will only copy the data component of a disc’s contents if it recognizes the filesystem (most linux filesystem types ext2/3/reiser plus ntfs and fat… it seems like a couple others too.) If it doesn’t recognize the filesystem it drops back to bit by bit mode which is nice. The only other thing I would want from it is better documentation and dd_rescue capabilities. (And maybe a fuse module to be able to image to/from ftp servers.) It supports several network approaches (samba/ssh) for writing/reading images over a network.