Thoughts on cloning software?

[UMTH]

Im looking for a open source solution for imaging some hard drives around the office. Any suggestions on one that you really enjoy?

[KRH]

MS ImageX is free and works fine. It supports incremental images. We are using Windows Deployment Services in our environment. It's free too if you have Windows Server license.

[Anonymous]

NTBackup works great, it's not really a cloning tool, but it's free and it's available in all our computers. No down time, and doesn't disturb a lot the workstation being backed up.
Acronis and other products are more user friendly, but with ntbackup and a litle scripting you can do almost what you wish 🙂

[i_kulgu]

I'm using Altiris Deployment Server.
You can do everything what LS can do + creating images from network computers, making executables, edit or create msi files for distribution etc.
I really enjoy it and it's for 'dummies'.

[Anonymous]

There is some great software for this, but most of them you have to pay for it.
I'm currently testing NTbackup (the builtin tool on XP), I don't have any opinion on how safe it is, but it's simple to implement automatically or as a custom action...

[rkotvis]

If you only need to image a limited number of drives, Clonezilla Live (http://clonezilla.org) might be suitable. It's a bootable Linux CD (or USB key) which offers basically the same functionality as Norton Ghost. There's a Server Edition as well, for large scale system deployment.

Clonezilla is free, it's very reliable and it's easy to use, even for someone with minimal Linux experience (like yours truly).

The only drawback I've seen so far is the inability to image NTFS partitions with minor file system issues (some cross-linked files, for example); the program reports the error and then exits. Maybe there's a way to override this behaviour, but I haven't found it yet. Otherwise Clonezilla works just fine.