It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive.
With Clonezilla, one can clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes.
'Clonezilla Live' enables a user to clone a single computer's storage media, or a single partition on the media, to a separate medium device. The cloned data can be saved as an image-file or as a duplicated copy of the data.
The data can be saved to locally attached storage device, a SSH server, Samba Server or a NFS file-share. The clone file can then be used to restore the original when needed.
The Clonezilla application can be run from a USB-flash-drive, a CD-ROM, or a DVD-ROM. Clonezilla requires no modification to the computer; the software runs in its own booted environment.
• 2011-05-17: Distribution Release: Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42
• 2011-03-29: Distribution Release: Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-23
• 2011-01-18: Distribution Release: Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-59
• 2010-11-09: Distribution Release: Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-40
• 2010-09-27: Distribution Release: Clonezilla Live 1.2.6-24
• 2010-07-27: Distribution Release: Clonezilla Live 1.2.5-35
Updates (via Distrowatch):
Steven Shiau has announced the release of Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42, an updated version of the specialist Debian-based live CD designed for disk cloning tasks: "Stable Clonezilla Live 1.2.8-42 has been released. This release of Clonezilla Live includes major enhancements, changes and bug fixes: the underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded, this release is based on the Debian 'sid' repository (as of 2011-05-13); Linux kernel was updated to 2.6.38; syslinux was updated to 4.04; initrd was compressed with XZ, and this makes Clonezilla Live ISO image smaller by 3 MB; the pre-run and post-run commands were moved to the login shell instead of init so now it can be interactive; the GRUB 2 boot loader for EFI was added, this is a testing function for booting an Apple machine from an USB device with GPT partition...."
Read the full release announcement for a full changelog and a list of bug fixes.
Download (MD5): clonezilla-live-1.2.8-42-i686.iso (133MB), clonezilla-live-1.2.8-42-amd64.iso (139MB)
Features of Clonezilla.
* Free (GPL) Software.
* Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
* LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
* Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
* Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
* Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
* By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
* The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
* Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet.
* Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
* Software RAID/fake RAID is not supported by default. It's can be done manually only.
* Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can _NOT_ recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this.