Purpose

Provide a disaster recovery and system deployment method that is cross platform and location independent.

Details

Clonezilla is a drive media imaging tool. It can create images from media, such as hard disks, USB thumb drives, MicroSD cards, etc. The disk images it creates can be saved locally or to network attached storage. Clonezilla is a boot environment, meaning it allows for more control of local storage that would normally be mounted. It can also load these images on media. This makes it a useful disaster recovery tool.

Operation

Once a bootable source of Clonezilla has been obtained, boot the system to be imaged with Clonezilla. I covered Creating Bootable USB Drives in my last post, revisit it if needed.

Continue on booting with the Clonezilla live option.

Choose the language

Don’t touch the keymap, no need to most of the time.

Start Clonezilla.

Here you can choose to either work with images or directly with another device.

This screen lets you select from a list of image sources. Many protocols are supported, such as SSH, SMB, NFS, etc.

Here you can assign or lease IP for a bound network, used for network imaging.

When selecting DHCP, you should see a lease appear once the network adapater has bound correctly.

Next you will need to select the host you plan to connect to over the network.

Enter in domain info for native Windows servers.

Enter in the login for the network share.

Type in the share that will be attached to.

Select the security mode, if auto doesn’t work, try NTLM.

Next, you’ll be prompted to enter in the password for the share.

Type in the password, then press enter.

The next window will display your bindings, you should see the network media.

Beginner mode should work for most scenarios.

Here you can choose to save the local disk or partition to the image.

In this step, enter in the name of the image to be created.

Choose the local disk to image from.

You can skip checking the source file system if it is in good working order.  You can choose to either check or not check the image after creation.  Here you can choose to encrypt the image for added security.  Next you will be prompted to continue.  The image creation should begin at this point.

At the completion of the image creation, you should see a results page.

You are done. Image creation to local attached storage is simpler. The steps for restoring aren’t that much different either.

This is a good starting point. Clonezilla offers many more options than what is covered here. I would suggest visiting the developers website and learn how Clonezilla can best suit your needs.

http://clonezilla.org/

Happy cloning!