Clonezilla — The Complete Guide: Disk Imaging, Cloning and Multi-PC Deployment
Clonezilla is an imaging and cloning tool that boots from USB or DVD, outside your operating system. It creates an image of a disk or partition, or clones disk to disk, copying only the blocks in use. It is completely free under the GPL version 2, including for commercial use.
Clonezilla
NCHC Free Software Labs
Disk and partition imaging and cloning from boot media, including deployment to dozens of machines at once over a network.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Disk images — save a disk or partition to a file and restore it fully later.
- Direct cloning — move a whole system onto a new SSD.
- Many file systems — Windows, Linux, macOS and BSD, with sector-by-sector copying for unknown ones.
- Lite Server — deploy one image to dozens of machines at once.
- Storage targets — a local disk, a network share or an SSH server.
What to know first
It is particularly strong in a computer lab or when setting up several identical workstations. Limitations: a text interface with a learning curve, no incremental backup, imaging is done with the system offline, and the target partition must be equal to or larger than the source. Double-check which disk is the source and which the target — cloning the wrong way round wipes data.
Related tools
For the same engine with a simple graphical interface — Rescuezilla. For image backups while the PC keeps working — UrBackup. For scheduled image backup on Windows — Veeam Agent FREE.
Rescuezilla
Rescuezilla project
Disk backup, restore and cloning in a simple graphical interface from a USB stick, compatible with Clonezilla images.
Get it from the vendor
UrBackup
UrBackup project (Martin Raiber)
Client-server backup for an office network: file and disk-image backups of every PC to one server while they keep running.
Get it from the vendorVeeam Agent for Microsoft Windows FREE
Veeam Software
Image backup of a whole Windows PC, single volumes or folders, with bootable recovery media and bare-metal restore.
Get it from the vendor
Timeshift
Linux Mint (originally Tony George)
Incremental snapshots of a Linux system (rsync or BTRFS) to undo an update or configuration change that went wrong.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
The most established and comprehensive free tool for disk imaging and cloning, and above all for mass deployment — worth the time it takes to learn the interface.