Clonezilla LiveCD update has new multi-restore for USB Flash Drives

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Developers of Clonezilla Live, the free software for disk cloning, disaster recovery and disk imaging have just released the latest version, Clonezilla Live (1.2.11-23) with major revisions and fixes, Clonezilla, developed by Taiwan-based National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC), is available in two varieties. The first variety is for large-scale deployment (has successfully cloned 41 systems at one go) Clonezilla SE (the Server Edition) and the second

variety is for individual users and is available as Clonezilla Live. ClonezillaLive is the perfect software for single machine backup and restore.

What CloneZilla Live v1.2.11-23 offers

On Clonezilla Live, users can boot and run Clonezilla using a CD/DVD/USB Flash Drive. The computer’s storage media or a single partition of the media can be cloned to different media devices. Cloned data can then be saved to any image-file or locally on a SSH server, NFS file-share or samba server.

The latest version takes care of many bugs and has some major enhancements, and will be available on Debian Sid from Nov 28 onward.

The OS have received upgrades to latest versions with

• Linux kernel upgraded to 3.1.1-1

• Partclone, the partition image utility, upgrades to 0.2.38

• Gdisk updated to 0.8.1

A major enhancement has been the addition of a new mode-‘the one-to-two mdisks.’ Using this mode a user can take one image and restore it to multiple disks. This will allow users to create massive USB flash drives. This multi-restore function is useful as users can restore an image on several disks all at the same time.

VMFS5 imaging and cloning is supported and the developers have introduced a feature for assigning reboot and shut down option after completion of a cloning process.

Beginners get additional support with an option of source partition being available when they use the beginner’s mode, with ‘fsck’ changes.

EFI booting receives a fix and can now allow booting Mac Machine from a USB flash drive. Some tweaking with restore menu to has happened and the restoredisk and restore parts will be shown only if the image repository retains any images.

Some bug fixes

Major bugs fix that Clonezilla Live takes care of is the earlier failure to clone NTFS partitions on AMD64 version.

Another bug that has been sorted is the ‘-k1.’ Now ‘system reserved partition’ for Windows will no longer enlarge and booting failures will be prevented. The NFS 4 bug that would auto assign following a NFS version 2/3 protocol, when mounting NFS image repository is now also fixed.

Clonezilla has achieved a march over commercial packages like NortonGhost and SymantecGhost, which also provide cloning solutions. Clonezilla’s speed has been tested and proven, with the server edition successfully cloning 41 systems at the same time. It took just ten minutes to clone 5.6 GB system image to the 41 systems using the multicasting option.

The speed that Clonezilla achieves is largely due to its advanced technique at saving and restoring only those parts of the hard disk that have been used. The speed of cloning has found to increase phenomenally due to this technique. This also helps in cloning across all file systems.

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