At this point in the evolution of Information Technology, your company will greatly benefit form the ability to do a bare-metal backup and restore of a PC, laptop, or server. Installing from optical media is a fun exercise once or twice per year, but a wasteful way for a solo admin to spend his time. When you work alone, every minute is precious–by creating a standardized baseline for each class of hardware your organization uses you can decrease your deployment time of operating systems annd applications from a few hours to a few minutes per system. The problem is, up until recently, the tools to accomplish this were usually pretty expensive, entailing an up-front fee to buy, a per system fee to use, and an annual support and maintenance contract to keep it running. If you’re the only admin they can afford, its a cinch that there’s no room in the budget for a very powerful (and proportionally expensive) product like Altiris Deployment Server. …Enter the open-source folks…
Bringing together a diversity of powerful tools, Clonezilla is free software, released under the GPL, and supports the creation and deployment of hard-drive or partition images for numerous platforms, including Windows, Mac (on Intel,) Linux, and any number of others. It uses projects like partimage, ntfsclone, partclone, and dd to accomplish efficient bare-metal backup and restore of PCs, laptops, or servers without any software license fee. Clonezilla comes in two varieties, a Server Edition and a LiveCD. and what you need to do will dictate what you want to use. If you are solo administrator of a network of less than 20 systems, the LiveCD is a no-brainer. If your environment is larger, or requires you to deploy numerous images simultaneously, the Server Edition is for you.
Continue reading Deploy Workstation and Server Images with Clonezilla