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Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Alternative Disk/Partition Cloning Tools

My question today is ‘What are the open source/free alternatives to disk/partition cloning tools like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image or Paragon Drive Backup.”

The selection has certainly improved and matured since I research this topic more than 2 years ago. Back then a few alternatives (including SystemRescueCD and PartD, Partition Saving) was tested but none gives the comfort that the restore would be fail-proof should the need suddenly appears. The main problem I remembered was NTFS wasn’t well supported at that time. In the end I stuck to Norton Ghost.

Now it is time to return to this topic after installing 2 PCs in 2 days and potentially having to provision 100 more PCs to come.

Let me list the alternatives and I will get back with the result in a few days. In the meantime, if you have any experience, good or bad, with open source/free disk clone utilities, please leave a comment.

  1. UBCD – Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
  2. FOG – Free, Ghost-like Cloning Solution
  3. PING – Partimage is Not Ghost
  4. Linux Rescue Server – this one is interesting from an overall system management point of view.

Wikipedia has a good article to learn more about disk cloning.