Clonezilla Review: An Open-Source Disk Imaging & Cloning Tool

Our Verdict

Clonezilla is an open-source and free disk utility exclusively designed for system deployment, bare metal backup, and recovery. It supports loads of file systems, such as ext2, reiserfs, xfs, f2fs, nilfs2 of GNU/Linux and so much more.

Its presence is felt due to a wide range of features it boasts, including supporting MBR and GPT partition formats and unattended mode, the ability to reinstall boot loader, restore images to multiple local devices, encrypt images, and so on.

In this in-depth Clonezilla review, we'll go over its key features, pricing, and alternatives, helping you better understand this utility.

Main Features

With a plethora of screen recorders available, why should you choose Clonezilla? Well, we have some compelling reasons for you. Let's take a look at the most critical features in Clonezilla:

1. User-Interface

You may find Clonezilla a little bit unfamiliar and cluttered since it is a Linux-based command-line tool with no graphical user interface. Still, the information and options are perfectly organized and presented. Better yet, you can select between beginner and advanced workflows as per your situation.

2. Support Many File Systems

Clonezilla supports a plethora of file systems, covering ext2, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, f2fs, nilfs2 of GNU/Linux, and so much more, whereby you are able to clone GNU/Linux, Intel-based Mac OS, MS windows, FreeBSD, Chrome OS/Chromium OS and etc. So basically, Clonezilla is available on almost any system. Among these file systems, Partclone will only save and restore used blocks in partition.

3. Support Multicast

Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which makes massive clone a breeze. Plus, you can remotely avail yourself of it to save or restore a batch of computers if your clients support PXE and Wake-on-LAN.

4. Disk Images Can Be Stored Locally

You can store disk images onto a separate partition, external hard drive, an FTP or even a WebDAV server. Moreover, you can switch off the GUI to enhance speeds and exclude swap and hibernation files for Windows to save time and volume. A host of compression algorithms are also there to further diminish gross storage space.

Limitations of Clonezilla You May Want to Know

1. Differential or incremental backups are not available — a disk image cannot be readily altered or updated with file changes.

2. Clonezilla hasn't implemented online imaging/cloning yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned must be unmounted.

3. The image can not be explored or mounted out of the image format limitation. You are not allowed to recover a single file from the image.

4. Recovery Clonezilla live with a bunch of CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. For now, you'll have to put all the files on one CD or DVD if you intend to create the recovery iso file.

Pricing

Clonezilla is utterly free. It's licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2, which means you can use, modify, and distribute the software as per your needs.

Support

Being free and open-source, Clonezilla gets no official support channels. Still, there is sufficient documentation for you to check on the site. Better yet, a forum for asking questions and troubleshooting is available.

If you are a general user or a novice, the contents on Clonezilla may be a little baffling and technical for you. However, you'll appreciate the depth of knowledge demonstrated in most articles and discussions if you are a tech guy or an advanced user.

Step-by-Step Guide on How to Use Clonezilla

This section will guide you on how to use Clonezilla to smoothly record a video of your crush.

1. Creating a System Image with Clonezilla Live

Step 1.The most straightforward way to use Clonezilla Live is via a USB disk. You can either download the Debian Linux release or the Ubuntu version. Simply choose the architecture and download it as an ISO file.

Step 2.Create a bootable USB drive with an ISO file by checking "Create a bootable disk using ISO image" and locate the path of the downloaded Clonezilla ISO file. Then, hit "Start."

Step 3.Once you are done with creating the bootable Clonezilla Live disk, reboot your device and tap F12 as the initial boot screen comes out. Afterward, boot from USB storage.

2.Image Your Disk

Step 1.Select device-image or device-device mode(The first is for creating disk images while the other is for cloning one physical disk to another). Here we take the option of "device-image" as the instance.

Step 2.Now, select the location for saving the disk image.

Step 3.Configure the actual imaging (or cloning) operation. You can choose the beginner mode if you want to bypass confusing options.

Step 4.There are two vital options in the next page - "savedisk" and "restoredisk". If you select "savedisk" to setup a disk image backup, then it'll prompt for an image name, selecting a default name based on the date.

Step 5.Now choose the disk you want to back up. Typically, there will only be a single disk to choose from.

3. Restore a Backup Image

Step 1. Select" restoredisk" in Clonezilla page.

Step 2.Choose the target disk to overwrite. After that, Clonezilla will launch partclone, which detects if the image is restorable as a first step. Then partclone will restore your backup image.

4.Clone Your Disk

Step 1.Select the device-device mode in the setup, allowing you to clone a disk or partition to a local or remote disk or partition.

Step 2. Select the source disk.

Step 3.Choose the targeted disk to clone to. You must ensure you pick the right one if you don't want to lose your valuable data.

Alternative Software

There are loads of alternatives toClonezillaout there. We don't pretend that any application is right for every user, so you might want to check this chart and see how Photos Fixer Prostands up to these rival solutions.

Final verdict

Clonezilla is an open-source and quite popular disk imaging and cloning tool. It is fairly robust and powerful as much of its functionality is built on widely used and well-tested Linux utilities.

Still, you may find it very baffling and confusing to utilize this program as it asks for a host of manual interactions if you are a casual user. Also, since it runs from a bootable Linux distribution instead of natively from the installed OS, Clonezilla is not accessible from the native OS, and can't be easily scheduled to run on a frequent basis.

You'll have to manually configure the backup target disk each time Clonezilla is run. This is why we also recommend you to try EaseUS Disk Copy, which can save you from all the hassles and enables you to complete the disk clone within simple clicks.

To sum up, Clonezilla is particularly trustworthy for backup data integrity,well suited to scripted automation, and supports loads of file systems. Still,its interface is not that user-friendly and will requirea lot of laborious interactions.

 

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