Raiden's Realm: Review: CloneZilla 1.2

Review: CloneZilla 1.2 (Page 1 of 1)

Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: Dec 31, 2008 at 02:33pm
Section: Reviews
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CloneZilla is a live bootable Linux distribution with the intent to make it as easy as possible to clone one drive to another; this can be either on a standalone computer, or across a network to one or more other computers. This is a good tool for system administrators wishing to deploy a single Linux setup across multiple machines, just as it is a good tool for home users to backup or migrate their files and operating systems between drives. So how good is it? Read on to find out.

Overview

CloneZilla is an administrative tool designed not to be pretty, but to do a job and get it done well. As a result, you'll find yourself looking at a lot of text based windows, rather than graphical tools. Getting started, the disk boots into an interesting grub menu with some curious options. They include: "CloneZilla Live" with three video resolution settings (1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480) and three utility settings (To ram, safe graphics mode, and failsafe mode); "Boot to local OS" (if available); memory test using memtest86+; freedos; and two network boot modes (etherboot and gPXE).

Oddly, while the three video modes might seem like they're put there for convenience, choosing the right resolution is important. If you get the wrong one, you might have some things scrolling off the screen before you can see it. Once you select your resolution and begin the boot process, things move along pretty quickly. It takes very little time to complete the initial boot and bring you to a screen asking for the language of your choice. Only five are listed: English, French, Japanese, and Chinese - both simplified and traditional.

Having selected your language of choice, you're asked to choose a keymap. Most people can leave the keymap untouched (the distro knows your default keymap based on your language of choice) and just continue. After that you can either start CloneZilla, or drop to the command line. If you continue on into CloneZilla, you're greeted with your first prompt, which asks simply whether you want to clone from a disk image, or a partition.

Considering I had a partition handy, but no image, I started with the partition clone. An interesting aside for CloneZilla is that you can actually navigate through the menus and prompts using a mouse if you have one handy. Given that everything is done with text-based screens, that's quite interesting. After this, you're greeted with a prompt asking you to either choose a cloning mode, or exit to the command line.

There are four possible cloning modes. They are: Disk to local disk (aka, from one hard drive to the other on your current machine), disk to remote disk (aka from your local machine to a remote machine), part to local part (aka, from one local partition on your machine to another), and part to remote part (same as before, but to a partition on a remote machine).

Since I was going from disk to disk, I chose the first option. Now for those who are curious, the option to clone from across the network won't appear in this screen unless you choose to clone from a remote machine at the beginning.

After choosing your target, the next screen asks if you several questions, the default question being whether or not you want to reinstall grub on the target disk. After choosing a couple options, and clicking OK, you're greeted with a question of whether or not you should (a) use the partition table from the source disks, (b) don't copy it, (c) create a new partition table, or (d) enter another command from the command prompt.

After clearing two last chance warnings, a bit more happens before you're asked to go through two more option screens. After that, CloneZilla goes to work and starts cloning your drive. Since it only copies actual data, and not empty space, cloning happens pretty quickly. The total copy time is extremely short, taking just a handful of minutes to clone a 40 gig drive.

Once CloneZilla completes it's cloning, it does some post copy cleanup, and then asks if you want to power off, reboot, drop to the command line, or start over. Not sure why you'd want to start over, but I can see there being some situations where that'd be necessary.

After shutdown, when I switched to the second drive and booted from that, the new OS came up, ran perfectly, and showed absolutely no issues from being cloned. Part of the reason for this is because CloneZilla is based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, all great and reliable tools from the FOSS world, and all of which are reasonably well known. So this gives CloneZilla a lot more power than if it had tried to develop these same type of tools on their own.

Another advantage to this is the number of formats supported by Partition Image, which includes almost all of the major formats, including Fat, NTFS, UFS, Ext3 and others.

Conclusion

I'm really impressed with CloneZilla. While it's not graphically driven like Parted Magic is, it's still very easy and intuitive to use and one I would recommend for newer users (but not complete newbies) to use when copying or cloning their hard drives. For more information on this distribution, feel free to check out their homepage.

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