„You’re probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost?, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You’ve probably also heard of Symantec’s solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition? with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting! With DRBL and network boot enabled client computers, the only thing you have to prepare is a Clonezilla server. You do not even have to prepare a bootable CD or floppy with Partition Image for every client computer.
Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you can massively clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Unlike G4U (Ghost for Unix) or G4L (Ghost for Linux), Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone effiency. At the NCHC’s Classroom C, Clonezilla was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took about 50 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via unicasting and only about 10 minutes via multicasting!“
