Clonezilla is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

suite of

disk cloning Disk cloning is the process of duplicating all data on a Digital Storage, digital storage drive, such as a Hard disk drive, hard disk or Solid-state drive, solid state drive, using hardware or software techniques. Unlike file copying, disk cloning ...

disk imaging A disk image is a snapshot of a storage device's content typically stored in a file on another storage device. Traditionally, a disk image was relatively large because it was a bit-by-bit copy of every storage location of a device (i.e. every ...

and

system deployment The deployment of a mechanical device, electrical system, computer program, etc., is its assembly or transformation from a packaged form to an operational working state. Deployment implies moving a product from a temporary or development state ...

utilities. Clonezilla Server Edition uses

multicast In computer networking, multicast is a type of group communication where data transmission is addressed to a group of destination computers simultaneously. Multicast can be one-to-many or many-to-many distribution. Multicast differs from ph ...

technologies to deploy a single image file to a group of computers on a

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, campus, or building, and has its network equipment and interconnects locally managed. LANs facilitate the distribution of da ...

. Clonezilla was designed by Steven Shiau and developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

. Clonezilla is used to deploy

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s to computers by imaging a single computer and then deploying that

image An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or Three-dimensional space, three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be di ...

to one or more systems. It integrates several other open-source programs to provide cloning and imaging capabilities. Clonezilla works by copying used blocks on the storage device (i.e. SATA SSD, HDD or NVMe SSD). It is intended to support a

bare-metal In information technology, bare machine (or bare-metal computer) is a computer which has no operating system. The software executed by a bare machine, commonly called a "bare metal program" or "bare metal application", is designed to interact dir ...

deployment of an operating system by booting from a preinstalled live environment. The preinstallation environment can be booted from a

USB flash drive A flash drive (also thumb drive, memory stick, and pen drive/pendrive) is a data storage device that includes flash memory with an integrated USB interface. A typical USB drive is removable, rewritable, and smaller than an optical disc, and u ...

, CD/DVD-ROM or Android mobile phone. It uses

Partclone Partclone is a partition clone and restore tool. It provides utilities to back up and restore partitions and is designed for higher compatibility of the file system library. It is developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan. It is the d ...

, Ntfsclone,

Partimage Partimage is a disk cloning utility for Linux/UNIX environments. Partimage can save partitions in many formats to a disk image. Utilities such as Partimage are useful in a number of situations which are commonly encountered by network administrat ...

, or dd to image the drive either over the network or to a locally-attached hard disk drive.

Features

Block-level copying

Clonezilla can operate on block-level (sector by sector). Thus, its operation could be file system-agnostic. In other words, it can clone one disk to another without knowing what partitions or file systems the source disk has. This indiscriminate approach, however, is inefficient because it would mean copying every block, even if it does not contain meaningful data. Therefore, Clonezilla uses a smart file system-aware approach. It uses information from the file system to determine which blocks on a drive require copying. This ensures that only the space currently in use on the drive is copied while empty space is ignored. Clonezilla supports

Ext2 ext2, or second extended file system, is a file system for the Linux kernel (operating system), kernel. It was initially designed by French software developer Rémy Card as a replacement for the extended file system (ext). Having been designed ...

Ext3 ext3, or third extended filesystem, is a journaling file system, journaled file system that is commonly used with the Linux kernel. It used to be the default file system for many popular Linux distributions but generally has been supplanted by ...

Ext4 ext4 (fourth extended filesystem) is a journaling file system for Linux, developed as the successor to ext3. ext4 was initially a series of backward-compatible extensions to ext3, many of them originally developed by Cluster File Systems for ...

ReiserFS ReiserFS is a general-purpose, journaling file system initially designed and implemented by a team at Namesys led by Hans Reiser and licensed under GPLv2. Introduced in version 2.4.1 of the Linux kernel, it was the first journaling file syst ...

XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating system starting with its version 5.3. XFS was ported to the Linux kernel in 2001; a ...

, JFS,

Btrfs Btrfs (pronounced as "better F S", "butter F S", "b-tree F S", or "B.T.R.F.S.") is a computer storage format that combines a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle with a logical volume manager (distinct from Linux's LVM), d ...

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

FAT In nutrition science, nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such chemical compound, compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food. The term often refers specif ...

exFAT exFAT (Extensible File Allocation Table) is a file system optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards, that was introduced by Microsoft in 2006. exFAT was proprietary until 28 August 2019, when Microsoft published its spe ...

and more. For unsupported file systems, Clonezilla falls back to indiscriminate block-level copying. By default, clonezilla uses

but may fall back to Ntfsclone,

, and dd where appropriate. The app also supports LVM2 and some hardware

RAID RAID (; redundant array of inexpensive disks or redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical Computer data storage, data storage components into one or more logical units for th ...

chip sets.

Compression

Clonezilla uses the ZIP compression by default but can use other schemes such as

gzip gzip is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. The program was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler as a free software replacement for the compress program used in early Unix systems, and ...

LZMA The Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is an algorithm used to perform lossless data compression. It has been used in the 7z format of the 7-Zip archiver since 2001. This algorithm uses a dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar ...

bzip2 bzip2 is a free and open-source file compression program that uses the Burrows–Wheeler algorithm. It only compresses single files and is not a file archiver. It relies on separate external utilities such as tar for tasks such as handli ...

. Drive images can be split into smaller files and compressed to save space on the destination drive.

Encryption

Clonezilla supports creating password-protected images. In addition, it can mount

BitLocker BitLocker is a full volume encryption feature included with Microsoft Windows versions starting with Windows Vista. It is designed to protect data by providing encryption for entire volumes. By default, it uses the Advanced Encryption Standard ...

-encrypted volumes.

PXE booting

Clonezilla can be booted over a

computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

using PXE booting techniques.

Variants

Clonezilla process of cloning from disk to disk

There are two variants of Clonezilla: Clonezilla Live is intended to be used for imaging a single computer, while Clonezilla Server Edition (SE) is intended for mass deployment over a

Clonezilla Live

Clonezilla Live can image a single computer's storage media or a single partition on the media to an image file stored on a

SSH server An SSH server is a software program which uses the Secure Shell protocol to accept connections from remote computers. SFTP/ SCP file transfers and remote terminal connections are popular use cases for an SSH server. General Platform The op ...

, Samba network share, locally-attached hard disk drive or to a network filesystem file-share. Alternatively, Clonezilla Live can clone the data on one storage medium to another without the need to create an image file first. Image files can be deployed to the same or different computers as required. Unlike

Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office Acronis True Image is a proprietary backup, imaging, cloning and cybersecurity suite developed by Acronis International GmbH. It can back up files, data, clone storage media and protects the system from ransomware Ransomware is a type of malw ...

and Norton Ghost, Clonezilla lacks an agent that can be installed into the operating system. Instead, Clonezilla was designed under the assumption that the disk should be cloned without interfering with the operating system. It is booted from a preinstallation environment and operations are performed within a consistent environment.

Clonezilla Server Edition (SE)

Clonezilla Server Edition (SE) can clone many computers at the same time using multicast technology over a

. Multicast support is provided by UDPCast tool. Since such an environment is difficult to configure, users can download a Live disk that provides the operating system with all the necessary configurations already done. Images are uploaded to an image repository configured by the user, which may be a local directory on the same server as Clonezilla SE or a remote location such as a

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a Heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous group of clients. In this context, the term "NAS" can refer to both th ...

that is accessed using

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH Protocol) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH was designed for Un ...

Samba Samba () is a broad term for many of the rhythms that compose the better known Brazilian music genres that originated in the Afro-Brazilians, Afro Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th century and early 20th century, It is a name or ...

Effectiveness

Clonezilla is an effective tool for deploying software in training laboratories. Clonezilla can sometimes be faster than

and Norton Ghost for both imaging and restoration but can be difficult to configure. Clonezilla, however, is not a backup or disaster recovery solution because it does not offer incremental and differential snapshots, scheduling, or interruption-free operation.

References

External links

Rescuezilla
is an

disk imaging app with a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

that is fully compatible with Clonezilla. * {{Backup software Backup software for Linux Cross-platform software Disk cloning Free backup software Free data recovery software Free software programmed in Perl Free system software Operating system distributions bootable from read-only media