It used PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) booting to download a small Linux client and perform the imaging remotely, making it much easier to maintain a large batch of computers than by shuffling around manual disks. The FOG Project provides a web-based tool for disk cloning, aimed at tying together a variety of open source tools to make it easy to provide image solutions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. You can find the source code to dd on the GNU FTP site, which is licensed under the GPL version 3.

While little more than a simple terminal command, its simplicity means you can include dd in scripts to perform backups and restores in a more automated way, according to your exact needs. You may have used dd before to create a live USB installer for your favorite Linux distribution, or to copy an operating system to an SD card for use on a Raspberry Pi. If you're running a Linux machine, or a similar BSD system, chances are you already have dd installed: it is a part of the GNU coreutils. ddĪ more basic tool is dd, which has existed as a Unix and later a Linux command line tool for decades, which essentially performs raw writing from one location to another, and can be configured with a variety of options. The single-machine version of the program is essentially a Linux live CD that puts a simple menu structure around common cloning and imaging tasks.Ĭlonezilla is written primarily in Perl, and the source code can be found on the project's homepage under a GPL version 2 license. Parts of Clonezilla are essentially just wrappers around some of the other tools below, but this makes it an easier-to-use tool for those new to disk imaging. It supports a wide variety of file systems, including most of the popular file systems for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

ClonezillaĬlonezilla is an open source disk imaging and cloning tool built in two different editions, one for single machines and another designed to do dozens of computers at one time. Let's take a look at four such open source tools, each with a slightly different focus, that make disk cloning an easy task. But the market these days has widened, and many open source tools offer comparable and even superior performance. For many years, Norton Ghost (now a Symantec product) was a favorite tool among administrators and technicians seeking to clone a disk.

To do so, a disk cloning utility is a must, to make sure that you've got an exact, and uncorrupted, copy of your original disk. System administration professionals and home users alike share a need for the ability to be able to quickly and reliably make one-to-one copies of entire disks, both for the purposes of backup and recovery, as well as the process of easing deployments and complete refresh repairs and upgrades of existing systems.

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