Clonezilla, The Best HDD Cloning Utility That Comes With the GNU/GPL License

To be honest Norton Ghost is actually a pretty powerful hard-disk cloning tool. Not the only one, but I use it sometimes to restore my Windows OS partition (dual boot with GNU/Linux). It does almost everything. Split your image via several CDs/DVDs or compress it so the image would take less space, etc but that's not to say that it has its limitations.

The biggest drawback of Norton Ghost is that the time it takes to make or create backups of more than one computer (network or server backups usually). If that's so, and you're looking for an easy to use, OS Independent, open-source application that has the ability to restore 41 simultaneous backups within 10 minutes (5.6 GBytes), then Clonezilla is the one to call for!.

Won't win any "look-n-feel" contest... but it's quite powerful nonetheless!

It comes in two versions. 

1. Clonezilla live - Which is aimed at home computer users which allows you to boot into the utility itself via CD/DVD or using a USB drive.

2. Clonezilla SE - SE stands for server edition. This is for network system administrators who wants to to massive system image restoration, etc.

It supports a lot of GNU/Linux file systems + Microsoft Windows file systems, etc such as ...

*. ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX.

So if you have a network that consists of multiple operating systems... no problem.. Clonezilla can handle that pretty easily.


Here are the system requirements (minimum). 

*. X86 (32-bit) or x86-64 (64-bit) processor/s.

*. 196MB of RAM.

*. Boot device supported - CD/DVD Drive, USB port, PXE, or hard drive.

You can download it from here.