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. Three types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live, Clonezilla lite server, and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla lite server or 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

  • Free (GPL) Software.
  • Filesystem supported: (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, 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. 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.
  • Grub (version 1 and version 2) is supported.
  • 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.
  • Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively 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, or NFS server.
  • 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.

Minimum System Requirements for Clonezilla live:

  • X86 or x86-64 processor
  • 196 MB of system memory (RAM)
  • Boot device, e.g. CD/DVD Drive, USB port, PXE, or hard drive

Limitations:

  • The destination partition must be equal or larger than the source one.
  • Differential/incremental backup is not implemented yet.
  • Online imaging/cloning is not implemented yet. The partition to be imaged or cloned has to be unmounted.
  • Software RAID/fake RAID is not supported by default. It's can be done manually only.
  • Due to the image format limitation, the image can not be explored or mounted. You can NOT recovery single file from the image. However, you still have workaround to make it, read this.
  • Recovery Clonezilla live with multiple CDs or DVDs is not implemented yet. Now all the files have to be in one CD or DVD if you choose to create the recovery iso file.

License:

Clonezilla itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2. However, to run Clonezilla, a lot of free and open source software, e.g. the Linux kernel, a mininal GNU/Linux OS, are required.

What's New

This release of Clonezilla live (3.3.2-31) includes major enhancements and bug fixes.

Enhancements and Changes since 3.3.1-35

  • The underlying GNU/Linux operating system was upgraded. This release is based on the Debian Sid repository (as of 2026/May/17).
  • Linux kernel was updated to 7.0.7-1.
  • Partclone was updated to 0.3.47.
  • Package ezio was updated to 2.0.23.
  • Implemented the gocryptfs mechanism for image encryption due to eCryptFS deprecation. Added options -goc/-sgoc/ and -pg/-pfg in ocs-sr and the TUI menu.
  • Added a new program, ocs-cvtimg-enc, to convert encrypted images (ecryptfs to gocryptfs), decrypt, or encrypt images.
  • Improved MDRAID support:
  • Added programs ocs-mdraid-start, ocs-mdraid-stop, ocs-purge-mdraid-layout, ocs-save-mdraid-layout, and ocs-restore-mdraid-layout.
  • Lite server now supports MDRAID deployment.
  • Standardized naming conventions for MDRAID management.
  • Improved MDRAID stop/clean operations to prevent "busy" errors during restoration.
  • Added support for LVM thin provisioning.
  • Added b3sum to the initrd of the live system and implemented a new checksum mechanism for the live system using b3sum instead of sha256sum.
  • Added a menu to verify the boot medium.
  • Default to use XXH128 checksum (-a3) for Partclone in saving images and device-to-device cloning.
  • Enhanced ocs-blk-dev-info to output logical block size and improved its performance.
  • Language files updated: ca_ES, ja_JP.UTF-8, Brazilian Portuguese.
  • Added 6 new language files: cs_CZ, id_ID, nl_NL, th_TH, uk_UA, and vi_VN.
  • Added manuals for ocs-sr and ocs-onthefly.
  • Included new packages: brightness-udev, ansifilter, thin-provisioning-tools, gocryptfs, fido2-tools.
  • ocs-clean-disk-part-fs now runs interactively by default for improved safety.
  • Added a mechanism to prompt for bcdboot fix during 512n/e <-> 4kn conversions in ocs-onthefly.
  • Sorted Partclone-related variables by separating dd and non-dd usages (e.g., PARTCLONE_SAVE_OPT_DD_INIT).

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a failure in reduce_multipath_dev when acting on a whole disk with a filesystem.
  • Fixed a bug where the ncurses TUI was not shown when running partclone.dd in TUI mode.
  • Avoided duplicated outputs from virtual mapped devices (e.g., Ventoy) in ocs-blk-dev-info.
  • Fixed MDRAID issues: ensured arrays are only shut down during restoration, and implemented udev race condition prevention.
  • Skip thin pool data containers when saving, checking, or converting.
  • Fixed a bug in ocs-pt-size-from-sf regarding device name matching.
  • Fixed a typo in ocs-restore-mbr.
  • Improved ocs-chkimg to skip checking partition tables for MDRAID devices.
  • Opentracker whitelist access problem. Ref: https://gitlab.com/stevenshiau/clonezilla/-/merge_requests/47*