Clonezilla is a software which lets us create clone images of partitions. The software is actually a Debian based bootable Linux with support for cloning partitions and disks. It includes the ntfsclone, partclone and partimage softwares along with the bootable live distro.

The technology on which Clonezilla is based is the same as the proprietary software Norton Ghost, or it’s open source counterpart Partition Image. But the difference here is that Clonezilla is a thousand times faster than these softwares. It is said that the Server edition of Clonezilla can clone around 5 GB of data to more than 40 computers in less than 10 minutes. That is faster than any other disk cloning software. This technology of cloning through a server is called Multicasting Cloning. Clonezilla also supports Unicasting Cloning, whereby we can clone a single computer to another single one.

Currently, Clonezilla supports over 10 file systems including ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs etc of Linux, NTFS and FAT of Windows and HFS+ of Mac OS.

This software will come in very handy if you are running a web server and want to clone-backup it. Alternatively, we can also setup a cronjob to schedule this backup. clonezilla is licensed under GPL, which means all this, can be done for free.

to download Clonezilla, go to the download page here.