Clonezilla
Clonezilla is a suite of software that's designed to allow you to back-up and image new hard drives with your data. Multiple different file types are supported, and Clonezilla even has a server-specific edition for creating clones of numerous hard drives at once.
- Clonezilla SE can clone 40+ computers simultaneously
- Allows you to do a system deployment
- Bare metal backup and recovery of any hard drive
- Backup encrypted data to new hard drives
- Re-image hard drives in minutes to restore PCs
- Simple interface to get started with backups
- Supports multiple file types
- Clonezilla Live lets you create recovery media
- Clonezilla SE can clone 40+ computers at once
- Bootloader and syslinux can be reinstalled
- Can install encrypted images
- Completely free and open-source
- Incremental backups not possible
- Destination hard drive must be equal to or larger than data
Clonezilla is a disk imaging tool that allows users to create clones of their hard disk images for backup or recovery purposes. There are two editions of the program, once designed for personal use with a single hard drive, and Clonezilla Server Edition, which allows cloning multiple computers at once (such as for IT deployment). The program is entirely free to use and open source, making it one of the best disk imaging tools available. There are a few limitations as you'll need a device with an x86 or x86-64 processor with at least 196MB of memory. That should cover nearly all computers made in the last 20 years, but it's important to note that Clonezilla isn't compatible with ARM devices (most mobile devices are ARM-based). Clonezilla Live is a bootable Linux distribution that can be installed on any bootable media including a CD, USB flash drive, or USB hard drive. The .iso file for download is meant to be used with CD and DVD media, while the .zip file that's available is intended to be used on a USB flash drive. Once the live recovery media has been created, you can insert it into the computer's hard drive and begin the imaging process. It's a painless way to create multiple copies of the same hard drive, which is why many IT enterprise solutions use it when re-imaging employee's computers. The only real downside to Clonezilla is that it's not capable of doing incremental backups, so it's not something you set up and then hope to keep up-to-date. The community support for this software is outstanding, and if you run into any problems, there is an active forum that will help answer any questions you may have.