My Symantec Ghost software is getting too expensive to maintain so I went out looking for alternatives this weekend.  Had two really good candidates:  PING 3.00 and Clonezilla 1.2.1-23.   Obviously, from the name of this post after testing both Clonezilla 1.2.1-23 is the one I decided on.

Clonezilla had one really cool thing going for it.  It supports SSH / SCP of images.

PING was ok but I kept getting hangs when trying to connect to remote windows shares.  There were work arounds but, to me it seemed, less friendly.   It also didn’t have support for writing images via ftp (only reading) and did not seem to support SSH / SCP at all.

I tested Clonezilla Live image backups of both linux systems and windows systems with absolutely no problems.

I also added to my future projects list “set up a DRBL (Diskless Remote Boot in Linux) server.”  This will facilitate the advanced features in Clonezilla for supporting multicasting.

To get Clonezilla standalone up and running is as simple as downloading an ISO and burning a CD / USB. 

Download Clonezilla @ http://www.clonezilla.org/download/sourceforge/stable/iso-zip-files.php

Burn the ISO, boot the system you wish to image from the CD or USB you made, and follow the on screen instructions for countless easy to follow options.

Also you can boot to a root prompt (with either product) to reset passwords / accounts or fix broken files or file permissions.   Both products support partition and disk imaging.