I’ve been using Clonezilla for a couple years now so when I saw Linux Journal run an article espousing it’s use I had to read through to see what they said. Which is to say, pretty much what I already knew — Clonezilla is perfect for small to medium full system/partition imaging. No need to purchase Ghost when you can use Clonezilla for free. In fact it was my need to come up with a solution two years ago to perform full system image/restore when my company wouldn’t purchase Ghost for us and we were getting ready to head across the country on an extended business trip. If anything had happened to our systems while we were on the trip we would have been in a significant bind as we would have had to have waited a minimum of two days for replacement hard drives to arrive and we had no backups of the system. With the disk image in hand, if anything happen to the drives we could have driven to the nearest laptop service center and replaced the drive off the shelf, then restored the image.
Clonezilla is very easy to use, and shouldn’t present much of a problem for anyone. Even if they’ve never performed a system image/restore before. The simple menu system will walk you through the steps to perform the level of image making you need, or restore but if you want to read through the procedure ahead of time you can find out just how simple it all is right here.
If you want something a little more rebust for medium size cloning operations you can still use Clonezilla. Clonezilla-SE (server edition) will handle pretty much all of your multi-cast cloning needs as easily as the stand alone system.
