Clonezilla: Free Mass Disk-Cloning Utility - Final Thoughts
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Clonezilla has just recently started to gain popularity within the mass cloning and Ghost-like software suite niche. It does an amazing job. It is free and open to lots of additional features and functions, such as giving you the ability to write your own scripts to save/restore partitions/disks. This is the ultimate automation opportunity.
However, the product is nowhere near perfect. Its (graphical) user interface (since we can't really name it graphical) can make you frustrated if you aren't really careful. For example, there is no back button or any other opportunity to "move backwards" with just one menu tab if you have, by any chance, miss-selected an option.
This is something we can live with. After all, if you aren't rushing into things and carefully read the instructions shown on each menu tab, then you won't make mistakes. However, if your habit is to memorize the sequence of config-tabs and numerous steps in order to breeze through wizards, you should be careful since going back isn't possible. Thus, you may lose about 20 seconds restarting the setup.
Clonezilla has been "extended" via other, related open source suites, which are definitely worth checking and playing with. For example, the most significant project is called GParted-Clonezilla LiveCD. It's a LiveCD that boots off GRUB and gives you the ability to execute either GParted or Clonezilla. This makes it really useful when partitioning requirements also need to be done. That's what Gparted does.
Another impressive extension project is called Clonezilla-SysRescCD. In short, it's a Linux multi boot backup/restore and rescue CD that combines Clonezilla Live and System Rescue CD on the same CD. You also have the ability to boot from each. The latter utility is a collection of system rescue and recovery tools. Most admin tasks are aided with the tools found in the package, including file editors, network tools, etc.
Once again, we truly hope that this article has presented an impressive and useful free utility that is going to be helpful in your endeavors. The open source community provides an insanely huge amount of software; most of us aren't even aware of what really is out there. Chances are that somebody has already coded a tool that can make our everyday IT-related activities easier, faster, more efficient, etc. We need to find it!
Furthermore, we'd like to invite you to join our experienced community of technology professionals on all areas of IT&C starting from software and hardware up to consumer electronics at Dev Hardware Forums. As well as, be sure to check out the community of our sister site at Dev Shed Forums. We're friendly and we'll do our best.
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