Clonezilla

So I was looking around at open source stuff the other day, specially to see if there was anything like norton ghost around and I stumbled upon clonezilla. I was not quite sure what to expect and it was with some degree of nervousness that I let it loose on a computer. I need not have worried though clonezilla is fantastic simple and very fast. It is very much like ghost used to be, no frills no faff disk cloning. I must admit that when ghost moved to mostly being a desktop app thats when I lost my respect for it.

It runs as a live cd and walks you through all the options etc and give you hints on what options do so even a novice would be able to use it I would imagine. the most difficult bit is selecting the right source and destination disks as both of them were the same make model and size, so I had to just boot the live cd with the source disk in and take down the displayed serial number (I think its a serial number), and use that. Took under 5 minutes to clone an 80GB disk with about 4.5GB of used space.

Check it out