Creating a disk image is a great way to backup the contents of a hard drive and save the current state of your PC’s operating system and files. To create an image a cloning program is needed. Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.
The first thing that is needed is to get Clonezilla. Selecting the ‘stable’ release is usually the best option.
How to install Clonezilla Live
To install Clonezilla live, the basic steps are to download pre-build Clonezilla Live then put it in a boot media (CD, USB flash drive or USB hard drive). Two types of files are available, iso and zip. The former one is for CD, the latter is for USB flash drive. Besides, you can put Clonezilla live on hard drive or PXE server, too.
- For CD/DVD:
Download an ISO file for CD/DVD. Then you can burn the iso file to a CD/DVD with any burnning program, such K3b on GNU/Linux or InfraRecorder on MS Windows, and remeber to choose “Burn Image” to burn the ISO file on the CD. The CD can then be used to boot the machine you want to image or clone.
How to use Clonezilla Live
Once you have the bootable Clonezilla Live media, as created in the previous step, you can boot it in the machine you want to clone. Remember to use the Clonezilla live media such as CD to boot the machine. If necessary, you can set the first boot priority in the BIOS so that it can boot Clonezilla Live from your CD drive.
- You can refer to these step-by-step examples, which provide more details, e.g. how to save an image, to restore an image, to clone a disk, to restore an image to multiple disks, to create recovery CD, and more…