Clonezilla

Clonezilla is a cool open-source software that works through the command line. It’s built on ncurses libraries and is packed with features for cloning and imaging disks and partitions, specifically for Linux and UNIX-like systems.

What is Clonezilla?

This tool is pretty similar to Acronis True Image, which is a commercial program only available for Windows. Both save and restore the used blocks on a disk drive, making them quite handy!

Supported Filesystems

Clonezilla supports a wide range of filesystems like EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, FAT, NTFS, HFS+, UFS, minix, and VMFS. If you want to give it a try without installing it right away, there's even a Live CD version you can download from Softpedia.

How to Install Clonezilla

If you're ready to install Clonezilla on your GNU/Linux system, here’s what you need to do: first off, grab the latest source tarball in bz2 format from Softpedia—don’t worry; it's free! Save it wherever you want.

Next up, unpack it and fire up your terminal emulator. Use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to the folder where you extracted those files. Then just run the ‘make’ command to compile the software. If it says compilation isn’t needed—that's great! You can just use the pre-built binaries found in the /bin folder.

Alternative Installation Method

If that sounds like too much work (we get it!), we recommend installing the ‘clonezilla’ package straight from your GNU/Linux distribution's main software repositories. And remember that awesome Clonezilla Live CD? Yep! You can use that too!

Using Clonezilla with Other Operating Systems

If you're looking to clone disk drives with operating systems other than Linux, definitely check out the Clonezilla Live CD available on Softpedia. It works with both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) architectures.