Norton Ghost by Symantec is my favorite disk cloning and imaging software because it’s easy to use but unfortunately the software cost money. Although the Norton Ghost software protection against piracy is not really that strict and I can use it on any computers, but I don’t want to risk getting caught using it illegally at customer’s place. Macrium Reflect is also another good Ghost alternative and the free version works well but we have to install the software in Windows and run it from there in order to create a full backup. The Macrium Live CDs can only be used to restore images but not for creating backup.
I’ve heard of Clonezilla before and it seems to be quite a hit because it is free and also clones computer pretty fast compared to other linux disk cloning software such as Partimage. I remembered testing Clonezilla last year but somehow didn’t really got it to work but today I had a little bit of free time and I was destined to get it to work. Well I am glad I did and was surprised that Clonezilla can make a full backup of my desktop computer with a very good speed.
I am going to share with you on how to create a full backup of computer A and save the backup image to computer B via network. Why network? Because I don’t want to go through the hassle of unplugging the hard drive and connect it to another computer. This tutorial requires you to have a little knowledge on networking and user accounts.
You can either use Clonezilla Live CD or USB whichever is convenient for you. Making a Clonezilla Live CD is easy as you only need to download the ISO image file and burn it to a CD. To make a Clonezilla Live Bootable USB, the easiest way is to use Live USB Helper. Do take note that Live USB Helper requires the ZIP version of Clonezilla, not the ISO version.
Remember, this tutorial is based on a scenario to create a full backup of Computer A to Computer B. Before we can start the backup process, we’ll need to share a folder on Computer B first and assign a user to have write access to the folder. Once you’ve done that, follow the steps below.
1. Boot up Clonezilla Live on the computer that you want to backup.
2. Hit enter to select the default “Clonezilla live (Default settings, VGA 1024×768)”
3. Choose your language and hit Enter.
4. Hit enter to select the default “Don’t touch keymap”
5. Hit enter to select Start Clonezilla.
6. Hit enter to select device-image. This selection will allow Clonezilla to save your hard drive or partition into an image file.
7. Select “samba_server” and hit Enter. This option is if you have another computer on the network which is running Windows and you want to save the backed up image to that computer’s shared drive.
8. Hit enter to select dhcp. If you are able to connect to the network and use the Internet by plugging in the network cable or using wi-fi, then 99% of the time you already have DHCP service running.
9. Enter the IP Address of the computer (Computer B) where you want to save the image to. You can also enter computer name.
10. Hit the tab button twice until the Cancel option is selected. Then hit Enter.
11. Enter a user account that is valid on Computer B that has permission to access the shared folder.
12. Enter the directory where Clonezilla image will be saved to. This is the name of the folder that is shared. For example, /images and hit Enter.
13. Hit enter when asked you to enter password.
14. Now type in the user’s account password followed by Enter.
If you’ve entered a correct user account and password, it’ll show a list of file system disk space usage. Hit Enter again.
15. Hit enter to select Beginner mode.
16. You can now select if you want to backup the whole hard disk or just partition. To save local disk as an image, select savedisk and hit Enter.
17. Input a name for the saved image to use and click OK.
18. If you only have one hard disk, Clonezilla will automatically select the drive for you. Hit Enter to continue.
19. Hit Enter to continue.
20. Final confirmation. Press Y on your keyboard and hit enter.
Clonezilla will now start creating the image and simultaneously transfer it to Computer B shared drive. On a 100Mbps network, Clonezilla is showing a rate of 200MB/min. The whole processed of creating a full backup image of my Windows XP computer and saved it to another computer finished in just 7 minutes! Clonezilla is really impressive! This is only one example of how to use Clonezilla to make a backup image of a computer. You can also do disk to disk cloning and multicasting. By the way, the image file will be saved in gzip format, an open source file compression program. So you can extract the image file using any ZIP extractors to access the files.
Note: Been a very busy weekend. I will now start to compile all the entries for the BitDefender Internet Security 2010 and choose the winners by randomly shuffling the list. Sorry for the delay.
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Hi Raymond: Selecting SMB server at Step 7 of your excellent tutorial, I get an error: “No supported network cards found”.
I have a DH67CL Intel motherboard PC, with an Intel on-board NIC. It runs Win XP SP2 fine.
Is it possible that the CloneZilla version I am using: 1.2.6-59-i686 – does not have yet drivers for the Intel H67 “SandyBridge” chipset motherboard NIC?
I’ve been using clonezilla along with PXE boot for more than 4 years now, and it simply rocks.
.) never any crc errors. I wonder how people can have some..
.) never used samba to store images: only plain NFS
.) clonezilla can image parts/disks using partclone, partimage (hence clonezilla is not “slower” than partimage), ntfsclone, or plain dd.
.) never ever tried to image one Windows computer, then deploy to several computer. Anything else than sysprep is a pain in the ass. Can’t even imagine that some “admins” use Ghost without sysprep, thus spreading clones on their network.
We use SUSE 11, with a samba server for our images. We have over 2TB of images and have never had an issue restoring any of them. Great product.
Hrm Cory,
did it work, the Samba thing?
I have very much trouble here while doing the same – crc Errors while restoring over the network.
I user Clonezilla Live CD and a USB HDD for imaging and deploying loads of PCs every year. Its been fantastic. We’ve shaved hours off our deployment time. Currently, I am setting up a samba share to pull the images from and put images too since I am getting tired of carrying this old HDD around. I assume it will be a little slower over the network but I can still start it and let it run.
Thank for the article.
muito bom este tutorial. Eu usava o clonezilla para clonar disco local, agora faço pela rede. obrigado pelas informações.
thanks raymond. i tried booting the livecd on my laptop, but an error occured – “isolinux:disk error 80, ax4205, drive 9f”. is there something wrong with my BIOS?
thx ray
Hi Ray
i’ve got 2 HDD on the server where i want to store the image to.
I want the image to be stored on e:\share rather than c drive.
How would you go about doing it?
thank you,
Paul
rodwell, just use microsoft’s sysprep on your source machine before taking the image. Then when you restore that image to another machine, it can automatically assign SSID, Machine name, and add it to domain. Easy really.
hi ray
i have used clonezilla enterprise successfully on 33 machines. now all the machines have the same computer name. how can i automate the renaming of each machine as well as automating the domanin joining. all the machines are connected to my server..
thanks for your advice
rodwell
Dear Ray, Could you tell me where and how I can get the translator with the flags that you have on your blog?
Thank you!
@John Matheson
I agree with you…. I had tried a few open source alternatives… PING is the most reliable one… Don’y ever use Clonezilla… you’ll be crying when you need it to restore your important partitions from the images.
PING (Part Image Is Not Ghost) may be a better alternative for some users. This linux live CD can be downloaded from ping.windowsdream.com/. PING is very reliable. However, it is not very user friendly. The manual is required reading for first time users.
I always though it would be very difficult to backup an restore a partition, but it’s really simple, thanks :)
Event the latest Norton Ghost 11.5 Server that using Windows PE need both PC to boot the same Norton Ghost to make Backup to Network works (CMIIW), this one is great. Only need one PC to boot.
Thanks Ray, That is a good program
Backup with clonezilla is too risky. My friend and I tried a few backups. End up with strange CRC errors when we tried to restore some partitions from backups(no, my backup media is 100% healthy). The quality of the software itself is too bad… untested and unstable.
Looks good. I need to try it for backup and restore where I do not want to install Macrium.
I wonder if in the future we can get to save the image to USB external drive, this will be super, as I have problems using Ghost with external USB drive because the USB drivers I try are not working on all hardware. DOS drivers are not supported well anymore, but Linux is.
The speed of 200MB/min is not good, it take one hour for 12GB, and I see partitions with 50-70GB.
Interesting, thanks Raymond!
hi i m niki from kosovo i like see you if and you want me ok my msn is lini_ony@hotmail.com
Thank you Raymond,
very handy program
Hi,
Can CloneZilla be used with Windows Vista partitions?
Tanks.
bookmark! :D
thanks, Ray!
It’s awesome when we can backup through LAN network. I love the features CloneZilla has, by using it, we can do all type of backup :)
But I’m wondering about the image size. If it only gzip the content, the image will be too big. And one more problem, how can we restore from this backup? I’d love to read more your articles about this.
Thank you very much for this article.
Really useful thanks ray