Clonezilla, "Corporate" Level Drive Imaging

The best way to start off this article is to use verbiage from Clonezilla’s web site:

"You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You’ve probably also heard of Symantec’s solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!"

Said honestly, this is pretty cool software considering it costs zero dollars to acquire and offers a ready-to-burn ISO for fast easy use.

In short, Clonezilla does what would otherwise cost you a ton of money to do with Ghost (Corporate/Enterprise edition).

For those of you out there using Partition Image, you now have an alternative to try out.

Additionally, Clonezilla is actively developed. Very recently they just released a new live version based on the Debian "Lenny" repository, so this software is definitely up-to-date.

If you’re confused by the "multicasting" bit, this roughly means that if you were deploying a drive image to multiple computers at once (ordinarily used in corporate environments only), it took a very long time to complete. But since the advent of multicasting, the time to do it now has decreased dramatically. Clonezilla supports this fully.

Supported file systems include (but are not limited to), ext2, ext3, FAT, NTFS, HFS+ (Mac OS) and a few others.

Link: http://clonezilla.org

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While in the Corportate world I used Ghostcasting to delploy up to 100 computers at a time, we set up a special network to do the jobs, it was not on the main corporate network. A major time saver when your company upgrades from one platform to a new one.
This sounds interesting, since leaving the corportate world and becomeing self suffecent these types of tools are no longer availble to me.
Thanks for the tip, will check it out!
johngav
can it be used in apurely WIndows LAN ? ( WIN server 2000 + win2k clients )

http://www.menga.net Rich Menga
Yes. See this:
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-server-edition/
and this:
http://drbl.sourceforge.net/

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/ Ed
I wonder how Clonezilla copmares to Acronis ture image 2009 software.
Frank Verano
I have an old version of Acronis. It works OK and simply. Blut I paid for it and it came with other things which I don’t need. FV