I've used Norton Ghost in the past, that was fairly simple and straight forward, Im just wondering wether Clonezilla is as easy to use?

Is it able to make full HD copies including the bootloader in the MBR, to dvd-r? and restore back to the HD?

Clonezilla is fast, efficient and easy to use. Except ...

... if you have slow drives / media it can get painfully slow (but shouldn't be slower than ghost on the same hardware)
... the command line / text menu interface can be pretty daunting for first time users. There are plenty of tutorials around the web - have a look and you'll see what I mean.

You can indeed back up and restore the MBR and all partitions. Or you can back up and restore just some partitions. (One minor limitation: you can't restore a saved partition e.g. sda5 to a different partition number e.g. sda6 ... at least not without some unsupported editing.)
You can indeed back up to and restore from DVD. Although if you have space I would much prefer backing up to an external HDD, with options to split at 2GB or 4GB or whatever, and then write the image files to DVD later. Or not at all ... I don't want to wait around while writing 25GB to 6 or more DVDs!

There is no built in equivalent of "Ghost Explorer" for accessing the saved image and retrieving specific files - although with the right linux commands, mounting the saved image as a loopback device achieves the same results.

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Clonezilla also has some bugs. It may not work on your hardware. Ghost was a fantastic product until after 2003 version. Dos simply was the reason so they bought out a different company and now the virtual hard dive image using Win PE2 is the way they do it. Still good but not in my opinion as good.

Is there a clone of it? No, not really. Clonezilla is simple. It tries to use common tools that you already have access to. Partimage and Gparted are it's core tools. If it can't read file by file then it does a dd or bit by bit. Remember you could force ghost to do that.

A similar tool is redobackup.

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Indeed, 103 open bugs.

What bugs did you have in mind?

Maybe that should have been a single sentence. "has some bugs. It may not work on your hardware"

Thanks guys, Im going to try both of them. Redobackup looks polished. Although neither seem to burn to a dvd-r, which would be my prefered choice. I'll just back up to usb, although the idea of backing up to usb bugs me for some reason..

You would be surprised how poor a cd/dvd is really. A cheap usb drive would outlast even some of the best dvd's. It may be that you can go to dvd-ram for better results. I have some small ones and am trying to see if they last 100,000 writes.

What you do is save the image to chunks if it is not already doing it. Then move the chunks to dvd's.

Here is another way. http://sourceforge.net/projects/clon...essage=4848130

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Have a look at http://www.mondorescue.org/. It might do what you need.

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