Hello all,

I need to clone around 100 machines in couple of days. I saw Acronis and was amazed by the speed of its cloning. I need something like Acronis with regard to the speed of its.

Now before you ask me to use Ghost 4 Linux, and clonezilla, I would like to mention that I have used these before and I would like something better and faster. I do not say that these are not good but not as fast as Acronis.
Anything that is even half as fast as acronis would also solve my problem though.

Well then, why not use Acronis?

Perhaps you mean you want to do all that for free?
In which case you need to quantify your desired specifications clearly. How fast do you actually need to be? What do you mean by "better"? What is lacking from the programs you have tried, which you need?

Otherwise all any of us can do is point you at our favorite clone method.

Getting the speed and features you want may not just be a matter of picking the right program anyway. There may be methodology and configuration changes which mean that the software you have will perform more to your liking.

Obviously I need some software that I do not need to pay for. The reason I do not want to pay is that I may not need it always.
As I said I just want to clone around 100 machines. The number is not exact and the reason is I myself do not right now know it but it is supposed to be around 100 ( may be 20 more or less ).
I tried g4l which takes around 30 mins to clone 80gb drive. Where as I saw acronis clone 320gigs drive in less than 5 mins. Thats a huge difference and can save a lot of time for me.
And hence I say even half fast as acronis.
The reason I suppose is that g4l will look up free space as well and clone it but acronis will not do that and will only clone the data with mbr and that is what I want. G4L will work for me but I do not have that much time with me this time. I used it previously and used it without complaining as I had some time in my hand then.

A quick google around recent articles suggests that a speed of 5-10GiB/min seems pretty normal these days. Acronis devs claim 9GiB/min. Your observed speed in excess of 60GiB/min seems pretty unbelievable - I'd double check that if I were you.

G4L users report 5-6GiB/min - 30mins suggest 150GiB data, which is way far off so there must have been something going wrong. Perhaps it was running on a slow machine? Perhaps this was some time ago (G4L fixed a "speed problem" in January.)

Your comments seem to be telling me that you expect the disks you are cloning to be mostly unused. That would provide a significant apparent time saving. To compare the app speed, you need to do the test on identical drives on the same machine.

What I've been finding interesting is articles dated only 18 months ago calling speeds like 600MiB/min "fast". It's also hard to get reliable data. Much depends on the actual environment.

Going the free route - you can use dd + zip directly which copies the 00 bytes as well. I find multiple reports on this being significantly faster than G4L anyway.

The usual next step is to consider partimage, which only copies data from the used bits. I'd imagine similar effects from CloneZilla - which you claim is not up to snuff either.

Other people try different things:
http://www.crn.com/white-box/1712004...RSKHSCJUNN2JVN
... seems to use rsync

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...timage-578236/
... discusses different cloning programs.

Thanks for the link and all the data.
I did try both of the apps on almost empty disks. Only operating system and office apps installed.
And yes, I did double check that. I would say Acronis did not take long for there was not much data there. Ghost for Linux on other hand was used on comparable machine with almost similar specs. It was in no means a slower and older machines. G4L was used on Dell optiplex machines will Acronis was used on HP machines. Only comparable difference was drive, Hp had 320 gig drive while Dell had 80gig. Nothing much to mention.
When you said that G4L had worked on speed problems, I downloaded the newer 0.30 version. It seems it runs well off the cd but it does not display anything when booted from the USB stick.
Any guesses where is this issue coming from? Both cd and usb were created from same iso.

One thing that I would like to mention here is that I am not cloning Linux but Windows.

According to my calculations the new G4L 0.30 can clone the drive at the speed of 3.3 G/sec.

clonezilla I think would be the closest free solution that is comparable to Acronis..

http://clonezilla.org/

Clone speed is going to be affected by different factors. the only way to truly compare two cloning apps is to clone the exact same Hard drive on the exact same system and look at the difference in cloning speed. Otherwise there are a lot of variables to consider. Drive rotational and seek speed, Disk cache, disk controller interface, amount of data on the disk, File system on the disk, cloning method.. the list goes on. So the only fair comparison is the same drive with the same data on the same system.

I believe you may have an app called ntfsclone already - have you tried that?
http://www.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsclone

You have not said what is wrong with clonezilla or what additional things you need besides high speed.
It is also not clear if you need to make clone images of 100 drives or if you need to clone one and then get it to all those drives (which would be more usual).

Thanks for all the valuable suggestions. I am looking into ntfsclone but I guess most of my work is done now. I downloaded the acronis trial version and installed it. And then created the iso out of it. It works and works really fast.
As you suggested, I tried acronis on the same machine that I tried G4L on and there is a lot of difference in the speeds. G4l as I said takes around 25 mins while acronis takes around 5 mins for the same drive on the exact same machine.
But I will take a look into clonezilla again but I did not find it that fast last time I used it.

Ah - serious resistance to actually spelling out your situation - so only general guesswork is available to you. Partimage is known to be quite fast, but does not have complete support for ntfs. (Though it may have sufficient support for your needs.)

Sure - for a one-off, the trial acronis is what you want because what you really want is acronis. You'll only run into trouble where you want to use it again after the trial period has expired. (It will be interesting to see how robust their protection software is.) Take care with this as it can be a kind of lock-in.

The professionals in this country all use clonezilla or rsync - they tell me that the need to clone a drive is not as pronounced in gnu/linux shops - the end is often acheived by different means. And there's the rub - perhaps clonezilla is slow with ntfs? That wouldn't be surprising. I'd expect free software tools to be a tad sluggish handling proprietary file systems.

Speed is seldom much of an issue - cloneing and restoration is usually automated to be performed on a schedule. Very large deployments often cascade the work over several evenings.

ntfs-clone will likely have the least overhead - but it is not the kind of cloning tool you wanted. The documentation suggests that it can be used that way though.

One approach is to change the way the windows computer boot - use a small fat32 boot partition, for eg, can avoid some of the problems.

Finally, please note that the compelling reasons for using free (libre) software are not the features or technical excellence of the software. There will always be some proprietary software which can beat it in some feature, and we can always find someone who needs that feature.

Exactly. But I am FLOSS software fan and try to use them as much as possible. I dont mind spending some money to support Ubuntu and buy the Ubuntu merchandise to just support it in my way. I use Ubuntu and like it a lot and have been trying to convert some of my friends to Ubuntu or Linux in general. Acronis is good but I havent tried to clone linux machine with it so I am not yet comparing it with open source software as yet but will try that as well and would want to see how it performs.
I really do not want it but the place where I work would want it more than me and hence using it. But once I created the bootable media out of it, it magically transforms into full version.
I need to try clonezilla, but right now I am busy so do not have time to read the documentation and I have not used it for some time so I have forgot how to use it. I still think G4L is easier to use than clonezilla. But this is purely my personal opinion.
And I do not care if acronis is trial version as I will look into clonezilla once this project is done. I do not intend to use acronis all over.
If you could just briefly describe or give me commands how to use clonezilla from the shell that it puts me into then I may not even use acronis and go with clonezilla as well. Now that I need clone windows with ntfs which is a proprietary fs, I am helpless about it. I would not have even done it but I earn with this work and for money I have to do it.

Well Well Well. Where was I for so long. Clonezilla does have speed comparable to acronis. I did not check the speed but cz could well be faster than acronis. Now who needs proprietary softwares.

Ok. downloaded the USB zip and now my usb stick is bootable and it is much faster than cd rom.
Great tool to have and have been lot of improvements since last I used it some time ago.

Some time ago I produced a disk clone for Acer with partimage - chosen because I could understand it right away. Clonezilla was considered, but discarded as a much bigger tool than I needed and I did not expect to be doing this much. I just could not think of a use for cloned drives on a regular basis (beyond OS pre-installs).

Neet to see how it goes though.

Cloning is a good option when I have to deploy around 100 desktops in a day or two. And that is what we need to do right now. It is easy to clone machines rather than to install 100 machines with os, softwares, drivers et al.