Open Source Disk Cloning/Backup Softwares for Linux

Free Backup Tools to Clone Linux System Disk

Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the hard disk. This increases the clone efficiency. With some high-end hardware in a 42-node cluster, a multicast restoring at rate 8 GB/min was reported.

Features:
Many File systems are supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs and nilfs2 of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, (5) minix of Minix, and (6) VMFS3 and VMFS5 of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Minix, VMWare ESX and Chrome OS/Chromium OS, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored by Partclone. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.

*LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.

*Boot loader, including grub (version 1 and version 2) and syslinux, could be reinstalled.

*Both MBR and GPT partition formats of hard drive are supported. Clonezilla live also can be booted on a BIOS or uEFI machine.

*Unattended mode is supported. Almost all steps can be done via commands and options. You can also use a lot of boot parameters to customize your own imaging and cloning.

*One image restoring to multiple local devices is supported.

*Image could be encrypted. This is done with ecryptfs, a POSIX-compliant enterprise cryptographic stacked filesystem.

*Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massive clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.

*The image file can be on local disk, ssh server, samba server, NFS server or WebDAV server.

*AES-256 encryption could be used to secures data access, storage and transfer.

*Based on Partclone (default), Partimage (optional), ntfsclone (optional), or dd to image or clone a partition. However, Clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.


*By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
You may download the latest version of Clonezilla here.
                                               DOWNLOAD

dd (data duplicator) 

Dd- Mighty Disk Destroyer. Many Admins fear and even cower when the letters DD are mentioned together DD can be your best friend. Being that you are a Linux Professional and or want to be a professional, you are sometimes faced with the need to clone, backup and or restore Hard Drive images On the Fly. Secondly, you many want to create backups of Hard Drives for future deployment. Lastly, sometimes you have a failing Hard Drive that needs to be migrated over to a good Hard Drive.

dd command must be used with caution. This command is so powerful and could wipe your data if you use it the wrong way.


For example: To clone disk 1 (/dev/sdb) to disk 2 (/dev/sda), use the following command:

# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda status=progress

For More information about DD you can use bellow command from your terminal 

# man dd

Or you can visit this website : - Link 

Partclone

Partclone is a program similar to the well-known backup utility "Partition Image" a.k.a partimage. Partclone provides utilities to save and restore used blocks on a partition and is designed for higher compatibility of the file system by using existing libraries, e.g. e2fslibs is used to read and write the ext2 partition.

Partclone now supports ext2, ext3, ext4, hfs+, reiserfs, reiser4, btrfs, vmfs3, vmfs5, xfs, jfs, ufs, ntfs, fat(12/16/32), exfat, f2fs, nilfs. The available programs are:

partclone.btrfs

partclone.ext2, partclone.ext3, partclone.ext4

partclone.fat32, partclone.fat12, partclone.fat16

partclone.ntfs

partclone.exfat

partclone.hfsp

partclone.jfs

partclone.reiserfs

partclone.reiser4

partclone.ufs (with SU+J)

partclone.vmfs (v3 and v5)

partclone.xfs

partclone.f2fs

partclone.nilfs2

Partclone support local and remote ssh server to store the backup image. 

# partclone.ext4 -c -s /dev/sda1 -o ~/data1.img

The command will backup an ext4 partition (/dev/sda1) to data1.img image file. To restore from an image file, use the following command:

# partclone.ext4 -r -o /dev/sda1

Download Partclone 

Deepin Clone

Deepin Clone is a tool to backup and restore developed by Deepin Technology. It supports to clone, backup and restore disk or partition. And works with Deepin Recovery to fix the boot, partition and so on.

Project Location:

Source Code Location: https://github.com/linuxdeepin/deepin-clone

Beta Version Location: https://cr.deepin.io/#/admin/projects/deepin-clone

Redo Backup

Redo Bakcup is a Live CD tool to clone your drivers easily, Redo Backup is a free & Open Source Live System licensed under GPL 3 to do the job, Features are as the website says.

• Easy graphical user interface boots from CD in less than a minute
• No installation needed; runs from a CD-ROM or a USB stick
• Saves and restores Windows and Linux machines
• Automatically finds local network shares
• Access your files even if you can't log in
• Recover deleted pictures, documents, and other files
• Internet access with a full-featured browser to download drivers
• Live CD download size is only about 250MB

Download Redo Backup

Mondo Rescue

Mondo is reliable. It backs up your GNU/Linux server or workstation to tape, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R[W], DVD+R[W], NFS or hard disk partition. In the event of catastrophic data loss, you will be able to restore all of your data [or as much as you want], from bare metal if necessary. Mondo is in use by Lockheed-Martin, Nortel Networks, Siemens, HP, IBM, NASA's JPL, the US Dept of Agriculture, dozens of smaller companies, and tens of thousands of users.

Mondo is comprehensive. Mondo supports LVM 1/2, RAID, ext2, ext3, ext4, JFS, XFS, ReiserFS, VFAT, and can support additional filesystems easily: just e-mail the mailing list with your request. It supports software raid as well as most hardware raid controllers. It supports adjustments in disk geometry, including migration from non-RAID to RAID. It supports BIOS and UEFI boot modes. Mondo runs on all major Linux distributions (Fedora, RHEL, OpenSUSE, SLES, Mageia, Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo) and is getting better all the time. You may even use it to backup non-Linux partitions, such as NTFS.

Mondo is free! It has been published under the GPL v2 (GNU Public License), partly to expose it to thousands of potential beta-testers but mostly as a contribution to the Linux community.

Download Mondo 

doClone

DoClone is a free project developed in C++ for creating or restoring GNU/Linux systems images. It can also work on a LAN to transfer data within computers. This tool provides an easy way to manage the GNU/Linux installation in offices or schools, including machines with different hardware, e.g., different hard-disk sizes, using only the space required by the data.
Features are as the website says.

• Supports 12 filesystems.
• Supports 9 disk labels.
• Clones disks or partitions with different sizes.
• Clones selinux systems.
• GRUB boot loader restoration.
• Multiple cloning on a LAN.
• UUID's and filesystem labels cloning.
• Live cloning: a system can make images of itself.

This program is free software and is distributed under the GNU GPL v3 License.

Latest version is 0.8.0:  Download

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