Clonezilla Live USB
July 30, 2012 / by Marco / Categories : Technology
Clonezilla is an open source tool similar to Norton Ghost. It’s all text based and I’ve been using it for years and works well. But every time I create a Live USB boot drive, I seem to get it wrong all the time so I decided to create this post.
What is Clonezilla?
You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®. The problem with these kind of software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You’ve probably also heard of Symantec’s solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!
Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!
Instructions
The instructions that is on their website is very detailed. If you follow them step by step you won’t go wrong. It’s very straight forward and simple to use. Here’s just a quick summary of what you need to do:
– Download the latest iso image
– Download Tuxboot
Now grab a spare USB drive. Anything over 2GB would do. Before you use this tool format your USB drive to FAT. This is one of the steps I keep forgetting. <- DON’T FORGET THIS!!
Then run the program and it will automatically create the USB Boot drive.
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