Despite being a veteran of the sector, we have never dedicated a post to Clonezilla , the well-known Linux distribution focused on disk cloning, disk image management and system deployment. Its origin is in the Free Software Laboratories of the National Center for High Performance Computing in Taiwan.
For those who are lost, Clonezilla is an operating system that competes with well-known solutions such as Norton Ghost and Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, with the advantage of being free software, at least in a high percentage. In addition to business, it can also be useful in a home environment where operating systems tend to crash frequently and you want to recover them easily.
Clonezilla has two variants: one live (Live) aimed at creating an image of a computer and another server (Server) intended for massive deployments through the network . Both variants can be inserted into a bootable pen drive and use Partclone, Ntfsclone and Partimage as tools to generate images of a drive over the network or locally via a connected storage drive.
With the distribution already presented, we mention the novelties of Clonezilla 3, the new major version based on Debian Sid. Here, to begin with, we find the presence of Linux 5.17 as a kernel, which should give the system good support for hardware (something crucial for a tool of this type). of that, support for Apple File System (APFS) capable of cloning and imaging has been added, as well as support for LUKS media encryption .
Other additions are a memory checker ( memtester ) in the UEFI boot menu , the implementation of a better mechanism to check if a storage drive’s partition table is MBR or GPT (this has been added with ChromeOS Flex in mind ), the parameter use_dev_list_cache=noas a new mechanism to bypass the use of device list cache and boot parameter use_os_prober="no"to skip detection of operating systems by ‘os-prober’.
Added to all of the above is the addition of the ‘wavemon’, ‘memtester’, ‘edac-utils’, ‘shc’ and ‘uml-utilities’ utilities to the live variant, some updated translations and the removal of the live variant. live from S3QL , “a file system that stores all your data online using storage services like Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack” .
All the details about this release are published in the official announcement , while the system can be obtained, in its live (with an alternative version based on Ubuntu) and for server , from its corresponding sections on the project website.
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