ClonezillaLive

[AMDave]

Last night was the first time I had to use ClonezillaLive 'in anger' and it worked like a charm.

To be clear I have used clonezilla occasionally for a couple of years since I had problems with g4l.
You can use it to clone a desktop or server machine to an image,
and then again to load that image directly into a virtual machine to develop and test your changes,
and then again to deploy those changes back onto the server (as long as the app is separate to the app-db).
So I usually use a CD on the remote machine and an ISO on the VM host. But that has mostly been my useage of Clonezilla (not ClonezillaLive)

One of our laptop HDDs started chattering and beeping recently and I knew straight away that we had to get a new HDD asap.
But I don't have a hardware disk cloner (it is on my want list)

A while ago someone gave me a 256MB flash drive.
Right.
I know.
256MB?
I tried DSL on it but it didn't get much use as I already have a 4GB flash drive with Ubuntu 10.04 on it (excellent for using gparted GUI to resize windows partitions).
So I had put ClonezillaLive on the 256MB stick, as a just in case.

Yesterday the replacement drive arrived.
I set up a samba share on my workstation, plugged the USB into the laptop and booted to ClonezillLive.

I couldn't be more impressed.
I used the option to verify the partitions in the drive image as it went along (so it took slightly longer).
I had made the same amount of space available on the samba share but the Clonezilla default settings use compression and it only used 15%.
I switched the drives, booted to clonezilla again and wrote back the image.

Booted first time.
Awesome.

I was lucky that we were able to get an absolutely identical replacement drive.
However, if you cannot do that, ClonzillaLive can restore the images * in proportion *.
Nice trick.

One note - I did try to use the SSH data transfer mode the first time but became quite frustrated until I read in their forums that they did break it and a lot of people had the same issue.
Hence the fall back to samba.
Besides, using samba is like a windows share and that makes more sense to those of you who are non-Linux users.

So if you get caught in a HDD bind, reach for clonezilla live and breath some life back into an old flash drive.

Oh, and don't wait as long as I did to make the first image clone.
I should have done the first image copy as soon as I heard the chattering and beeping.
Next time I'll grab that USB stick before I even run the diagnostics.