Save and restore your harddrive

Clonezilla Live is an effective way to make a copy of your entire hard drive and subsequently burn it to disk for posterity.

By creating a one-to-one map of your PC’s entire hard drive, Clonezilla Live allows you to capture your computer at a specific moment when it is virus-free. Clonezilla Live can also map out individual partitions on your PC. The open-source program is based on Linux and works with most CD burning hardware.

The first thing to do is burn the ISO image file to a CD. Before starting up Clonezilla Live afterward, you can tweak the BIOS in the boot options of your PC’s CD drive. Once you’ve opened the CD on which the copy of your hard-drive has been burned, you can use Clonezilla Live to copy it either to a full disk or to individual partitions. Basically, your back-up location can be stored both locally on your computer, as well as on an external hard drive for added protection. One of Clonezilla Live’s most unique features is that it clones only the sections of your hard drive that have actually been used. Any empty folders simply don’t get copied, which is convenient and a great space-saver.

In the event you suffer a hard drive failure, you can perform a complete system restore via disk or by way of an external hard drive. You can also transmit the image you’ve taken onto different computers other than the one you originally copied it from.

Although Clonezilla Live is reliable and quite fast, it does not offer quite as many options as paid disk imaging programs tend to. Its interface is also a little plain.

Just the same, Clonezilla Live is a reliable and easy-to-use disk imaging tool for PCs.