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Zoredache
Asked: 2009-05-01 11:29:41 +0800 CST

What is your recommended disk cloning tool?

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Symantec Ghost used to be the tool to use, but from what I read, you no longer get a cli-client, unless you are willing to buy the Ghost Solution Suite at least 5 licenses and have another service running on a server somewhere.

So what tool do you recommend for disk cloning and image-based backup.

There are several OSS products, but it isn't entirely clear how well they support NTFS.

I am not really to just get a list of cloning. Instead, I would like to know what tool you use, why you choose that tool, and what you use it for.

After reading the answers I have a followup question. Given the tool you suggest, is it possible, and how easy is it to extract a particular file from the image without having to restore the entire image?

backup image cloning

15 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Acronis has some good products.

    We have been using their backup and restore products with success for about a year.

    I believe they have a product just for cloning but their backup and restore software can also be used as a cloning tool.

    Edit: Acronis has a trial period where you can try their products for a month. This really sold us because we were able to test and verify that the product did what we wanted it to do.

    Edit: They have support for both Windows and Linux. Not really sure about Mac.

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  2. I use dd. In the Windows world, you can get dd by installing Cygwin.

    What dd does is allow sector-by-sector copying of a disk device to, say, an image file. Example usage:

    dd if=/dev/sda1 of=diskimage.img bs=1M

    This copies from the first partition of the first hard drive to a file called diskimage.img, one megabyte at a time. (The Cygwin documentation has information on what the device names are.)

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  3. Nobody's mentioned Clonezilla? It has a pretty bad UI, but is very flexible once you get used to it. Google it and you'll find some tutorials on its use.
    I use it mainly because of its 'smart cloning' option (granted, other tools have that), and the when is backups or VM images I want to make 'real'.

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  4. I've used Easeus Partition Master quite effectively. It's free.

    http://www.partition-tool.com/

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  5. It all depends on your application. For a single drive to drive clone, I find that HDClone works great.

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  6. I like Gnome Partition Editor.

    It supports every filesystem I have ever needed it for and they have an .ISO you can download to make a bootable CD.

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  7. I would like to know what tool you use

    For Windows client machines on my network, I use SystemRescueCD, a boot-from-a-CD Linux distribution that you can also install on a harddrive partition. I partition the drive to create a small ext2 partition, then install the GRUB boot loader set up to allow booting to either Windows on the first partition or SystemRescueCD on the second partition. Booting SystemRescueCD runs an autorun script that checks a network drive for a disk image of that machine (use the network card's MAC address to identify machines) and reimages the machine if it finds one. For the actual imaging you can use dd, as already pointed out, or PartImage, both of which will handle NTFS partitions.

    If you're using Windows XP (don't know about Vista, haven't had to try) you can use the ext2fsd Ext2 filesystem driver to make it possible to re-write the ext2 partition, and therefore the GRUB conf file, from a Windows script, therefore making it possible to have Windows automatically reboot and re-image itself.

    why you choose that tool

    It's free, and well supported (drivers for new Dell machines came out within a few weeks of the machines being available, SystemRescueCD is actively developed).

    and what you use it for.

    I work in a school, we have to contend with grimy little children.

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  8. PING might be worth looking at. (love recursive acronyms PING Is Not Ghost)

    I've used it in a limited capacity for home/family, but from what I've seen it is a worthy replacement for Ghost.

    http://ping.windowsdream.com/

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  9. My favorite disk cloning tool is Drive Snapshot for the following reasons:

    1. No installation necessary, just one tiny EXE to run. (Thus, it can also be run directly from a network location or from a Bart PE environment.) No scheduler or "always-running" drivers, services, etc to create overhead.
    2. Can be controlled from the command line for scripting, or run via GUI.
    3. It is very fast and has good data compression.
    4. The developer has excellent customer support in my experience.
    5. Can "inject" driver files if restoring to different hardware. I have used this multiple times on server RAID arrays with no problems at all.
    6. Reasonable price.

    Regarding your follow-up question: It is extremely easy to extract single files from a disk image because like Acronis, Drive Snapshot allows you to mount a disk image as a drive letter and browse it with Windows Explorer like any other drive.

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  10. The products at TeraByte, Image for Windows and Image for DOS. The products are not free but they are very reasonable. They allow you to create boot disks and even recovery partitions. There is an included add-on program called TBIView that allows you to restore individual files / folders.

    One reason I looked into these products instead of Acronis is that it allows you to work on servers as well. Acronis is nice but they do not support server imaging unless you go to there much more expensive product.

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