Clonezilla is a Live CD That Let’s You Clone Your Hard Drive and Much More

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If you want to do low level hard drive copy/clone, we’ve covered one before, you can use HDD Raw Copy Tool to do that in Windows. But what if your system isn’t running Windows or isn’t bootable or rather an alternative to the tool. You can use Clonezilla,  it’s an open source disk cloning and re-imaging solution present in a form of Linux like Live CD. You can boot Clonezilla off a CD-ROM or make a bootable USB.

It supports almost all the disk formats out there. FAT, NTFS for Windows, HFS+ for Mac, UFS, ext2, ext3, ext4 for FreeBSD and Linux. The only requirement is when cloning the hard drive, the destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one. That said, it is not necessary to have the two disk exactly the same size.

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Some of the neat feature Clonezilla, also has is the ability to do MultiCast, meaning if you get the Clonezilla ServerEdition (SE) then you can distribute a single image to multiple machines at the same time, this is very useful when you have a small office or computer lab that has the same hardware and deploy the same image to all of the machines.

Why and what situation you might want to use this Clonezilla ? Well, for one it does one full clone of your entire hard drive, better than backup in a sense if you have OS on the hard drive, you basically has a backup of your machine. Some other use case could be the purpose to save one bootable partition when trying to install dual-boot or triple boot with different OS. With this clonezilla, ,you will never need to worry if you have messed up with any bootloader and unable to boot back to your primary OS. Maybe you can think of other use cases for such ?

Try Clonezilla now.

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