Open Source Cloning Software

Clonezilla

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition.

Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore.While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

• Free (GPL) Software.
• Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux,
  and FAT, NTFS of MS Windows. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux or MS
  windows. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are
  saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy
  is done by dd in Clonezilla.
• LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
• Multicast is supported in Clonezilla server edition, which is
  suitable for massive clone. You can also remotely use it to save or
  restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in
  your clients.
• Based on Partimage, ntfsclone
  and dd to clone partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other
  programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole
  disk.
• By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.

Which Clonezilla Shall I Use ?

• Clonezilla Live: Allows you to use CD/DVD or USB flash drive to boot and run clonezilla (Unicast only)
• Clonezilla
  server edition: A DRBL server must first be set up in order to use
  Clonezilla to do massive clone (Both unicast and multicast are
  supported)

Clonezilla Homepage

PING

PING (Ping is not Ghost) is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment.

Several tools have been added and written, so to make this ISO the perfect choice to backup and restore whole partitions, an easy way. It sounds like Symantec Ghost(tm), but has even better features, and is totally free.

Features include:

• Probably the best available Linux toolbox for rescueing a system;
• Backup and Restore partitions or files to a MS Network Shared directory;
• Backup and Restore the BIOS data as well;
• Either burn a bootable CD / DVD, either integrate within a PXE / RIS environment;
• Possibility to Blank local admin’s password;
• Create your own restoration bootable DVD (see the Howto Documentation);
• Partition and Format a disk before installing Windows (so to make
  sure your unattended Windows installation will happen on the right
  partition);
• Specific advantages PING brings you over DOS and Ghost :
  
  • Most network cards automatically recognized by the Kernel (unlike DOS);
  • Most CD/DVD readers automatically recognized by the Kernel (unlike DOS);
  • You don’t have to run a Ghostcast server to receive images over the network;
  • More supported filesystems;
  • You can store an image on several CD/DVD (CD/DVD-spanning);
  • You can backup and restore BIOS settings too;
  • Much much smaller than WinPE / BartPE;
  • etc.
  
  

PING Homepage

Partition Image

Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem

to an image file. Most Linux and Windows filesystems are supported. The image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2 programs to save disk space, and they can be splitted into multiple files to be copied on CDs / DVDs, … Partitions can also be saved across the network since version 0.6.0 using the partimage network support, or using Samba/NFS. If you don’t want to install Partimage, you can download and burn SystemRescueCd. It’s a livecd that allows to use Partimage immediately even if your computer has no operating system installed (useful to restore an
image), and it allows to save an image on a DVD on the fly.

Partimage will only copy data from the used portions of the partition.

For speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the image file. This is unlike the ‘dd’ command, which also copies empty blocks. Partimage also works for large, very full partitions. For example, a full 1 GB partition can be compressed with gzip down to 400MB.

This is very useful to save partitions to an image in some cases:

• First you can restore your linux partition if there is a problem
  (virus, file system errors, manipulation error). When you have a
  problem, you just have to restore the partition, and after 10 minutes,
  you have the original partition. You can write the image to a CD-R if
  you don’t want the image to use hard-disk space.
• This utility can be used to install many identical computers.
  For example, if you buy 50 PCs, with the same hardware, and you want to
  install the same linux systems on all 50 PCs, you will save a lot of
  time. Indeed, you just have to install on the first PC and create an
  image from it. For the 49 others, you can use the image file and
  Partition Image’s restore function.

Partition Image Homepage

g4u

(”ghosting for unix”) is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows

easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP. The floppy/CD offers two functions. The first is to upload the compressed image of a local harddisk to a FTP server, the other is to restore that image via FTP, uncompress it and write it back to disk. Network configuration is fetched via DHCP. As the harddisk is processed as an image, any filesystem and operating system can be deployed using g4u. Easy cloning of local disks as well as partitions
is also supported.

g4u Homepage

Linbox Rescue Server

TheLinbox Rescue Server (LRS) is a tool to centralize hard disk images(like Ghost Enterprise Server), file backups, hardware and software inventory (with Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X agents), secure software deployment using OpenSSH, and remote access on a single server. It canbe managed from any PC through a Web-based administration interface,and disk images can be restored using PXE boot or using a bootable CD or DVD. It supports Ext2/3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, and LVM v1/v2.

The Linbox Rescue Server is more then a image management system. It includes 5 modules that provide:

• system backup for emergency crash recovery, hard disk cloning or deployment. This module was fully developped by Linbox FAS.
• file backup, based on the famous BackupPC, to which we have added a configuration interface,
• inventory, based on ocs-inventory,
• remote control, based on TightVNC.
• control panel (integrated into Webmin)

Unfortunately at this moment the open source version doesn’t support
Window’s file systems. It will in the future once the entire project is
open sourced.

Linbox Rescue Server Hompage

Free, Open-source Ghost

Free,Open-source Ghost (FOG) is a computer imaging suite that is designed to be a free alternative to Ghost or Zenworks. It can be used to image Windows XP and Vista PCs using PXE, DHCP, PartImage, and a Web GUI to tie it all together.

FOG is good for anyone running Windows XP and Vista with a single partition. Right now FOG can only handle a single partition on the hard disk. FOG is currently being used by many schools and small businesses who can’t afford the licensing of commercial products like Ghost.

FOG Hompage





Credits:
http://packratstudios.com/index.php/2008/03/11/symantec-ghost-who-a-list-of-open-source-alternatives/