In a cloning project I worked on, my favorite freeware product from my googling journeys was Clonezilla. Clonezilla is free hard drive cloning software for taking a snapshot of a system and reverting back to it later as a backup or to get things the way you once liked them.

When you have a new computer and begin installing software that you enjoy using, that would be a great time to image the hard drive in case something happens later. This can save time instead of having to reinstall your operating system if there is a virus or corruption in data. Creating a copy of a hard drive can also save you from ruining the state of a computer due to tinkering, installing software, etc. If you do PC repair for customers or as a hobbyist, you can also use this software before beginning work on some computers in case you would need a point of reference for any reason. Clonezilla, clones a 40 gigabyte hard drive in about 15 minutes.

Clonezilla has two forms, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla ServerEdition (SE). Clonezilla live is used for cloning single machines while Clonezilla SE is for multiple machine deployments. This article is about Clonezilla live.

When using the live version of the Clonezilla free hard drive cloning software, I burned it to a CD and then set the computer to boot from that CD. The first screens after Clonezilla begins, let you choose video resolution, language and keyboard layout.

The following screen is where you will select to “Start_Clonezilla” or “Enter_Shell” which is to enter command line mode, to make things easier on myself I selected “Start_Clonezilla”.

At the next screen I selected “device-image”. The other option is to go direct from partition to partition or disk to disk or any combination in between, in case your choice is to only clone a single partition of a drive to another drive. I wanted to clone the whole enchilada so I selected “device-image”.

The next screen was selecting where to place the image that was going to be created. Because I was saving the image across our network, I did not choose the more popular option of “local_dev” to save on a local hard drive or USB drive. If using “local_dev” you will just need to ensure the storage device has sufficient space for the image being cloned. The option that worked for me was selecting “samba_server” which is, in this arena, equivalent to a shared folder on a Windows network. You must allow write permissions on the shared folder for the account that is chosen.

After this step in the process, another thing that has to be decided is how to get an IP address, either statically assign one or send out a DHCP broadcast in search of one so the computer can begin talking on the network.

Then the next option is choosing the location where the Clonezilla image is going to be stored. You can either enter an IP address of the computer where the image will be stored or you can enter the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the computer, which might be something like “cloneserver.internaldomainname.com”. The next step is to choose which domain that computer resides on. Keeping with the previous example, I would enter “internaldomainname.com”.

Then you will be prompted to enter a username that has permissions to that save location. The name of the shared resource must also be provided, Clonezilla by default will elect to use a folder called “/images”. You must ensure that your shared resource and the response here match. We were placing our images in a folder named “CLONEZILLA”, so we would change “/images” to “/CLONEZILLA”. Make sure yours match also; if you get red letters in a message, there was a problem.

Now you will be prompted to hit Enter to put in the password associated with the account you chose. You will see a password prompt but when you type, no asterisk marks “***” will appear. Hit Enter after typing your password correctly. You must also select beginner or expert mode, since I had never used it before and I like doing things the easy way, I selected beginner mode.

In our project, when I wanted to copy a hard drive and save it as an image for use on other computers, I selected the “savedisk” option. When you want to restore an image to a hard drive, the process is very similar except at the option page where you originally selected “savedisk” you would select “restoredisk” instead. Some of the options after choosing to restore are not there; like you won’t be prompted to name the image but rather select it from a list of image files that are detected on the shared resource.

Then you must give the image a name. Which hard drive you are making a replica of, or pulling an image to, must also be selected, if there is only one hard drive to clone or overwrite then it will already be selected for you.

Then you can begin the restoring process, by hitting Enter a couple of times, and confirming the actions. For other freeware cloning alternatives you could try nLite, PC Inspector Clonemax,Marcium Reflect Free Edition, or Odin and let us know what you think.

Check out the software and documentation from the Clonezilla website.

What software do you use to clone your hard drive over a network? Let us know in the comments.

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• IdleBackup – Use Your Idle Time to Backup Data (Windows) (6)
• MyPhone Backs Up Your Windows Mobile Device To The Internet (Beta) (9)
• How to Quickly Restore Deleted Data in Vista (10)
• How to Prepare Yourself for System Restore From Scratch (13)
• How to Backup Your Computer With an Old Hard Disk (18)

Why are we discussing a world body in a tech site? It’s because they lend their name to a well known file format too.

The ISO file (.iso) is just an archive file format of an optical disk. It can be said to be an exact clone of a file system because it’s a byte for byte copy of a disk with all of its data and metadata. It’s a popular format for downloads and transport over the internet. Anyone who has downloaded a game, an OS like a Linux distro, or an OS update would know them by sight. Also, being an open standard format along with another called UDF it’s supported by all optical disc software.

ISO is not the only one of its kind. There are others, each created by a disk manufacturer and his competitor. Some others you may have come across include – img, bin, mdf, mds etc.

So how does one deal with these ISO files? There are several easy ways :

• You can burn them directly to a disk.
• You can open them like an archive (remember they are uncompressed archives) using archive tools like WinRAR.
• You can mount them and treat it like a virtual drive.

Using widely available tools called free virtual drive software or Disk Emulators, it’s easy to mount an ISO file (or a disk for that matter) and use it as one would with a disk loaded in the CD tray.

Let’s load with three simple and free virtual drive tools.

Virtual CloneDrive

Virtual CloneDrive is a light 1.5 MB download which supports all common image formats such as ISO, BIN, IMG, CCD, UDF, DVD etc.

Mounting an image file is as simple as double clicking it or selecting it with a browse from the system tray. Virtual CloneDrive can mount up to 15 virtual drives at the same time.

Virtual CloneDrive is supported by Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP/XP64/Vista/Vista64.

Note: During the installation an alert that Virtual CloneDrive has not passed the Windows Driver Signature Test and the Windows Logo Test crops up. Ignore and continue with the installation.

MagicDisc

MagicDisc is another light free virtual drive tool, downloading at 1.3MB. MagicDisc supports a large number of image formats like –

BIN, IMA/IMG, CIF, NRG, IMG/CCD, MDF/MDS, VCD, VaporCD, P01/MD1/XA, VC4/000, VDI, C2D, BWI/BWT, CDI, TAO/DAO and PDI.

MagicDisc allows for the creation of 15 virtual drives and can also mount images on a networked machine. Mounting images is easy as the program also comes with an automatic image detection engine. MagicDisc can be set to auto-mount images after a reboot.

MagicDisc also comes bundled with a lot of other features like –

• It can make ISO images from a physical disk.
• It has the ability to compress and encrypt ISO files.
• It features an interface that can decompress UIF images to ISO format.

MagicDisc (v2.7.106) is supported by Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP /Vista/7.

DAEMON Tools Lite

DAEMON Tools Lite is the bulkiest of the trio with a 7.3MB download size. It is free for personal use. DAEMON Tools Lite supports a large number of image formats like –

b5t (BlindWrite images)/b6t (BlindWrite images)/bwt (BlindRead images)/ccd (CloneCD images)/cdi (DiscJuggler images)/cue (Cue sheets)/ iso (Standard ISO images)/mds (Media Descriptor Files)/nrg (Nero images)/ pdi (Instant CD/DVD images)/ isz (Compressed ISO images).

DAEMON Tools Lite gives us four virtual drives to work with. The image files can be mounted from the tray icon with a right or a left click. An image catalog saves a record of all image files mounted.

Also, the DAEMON Tools Panel gives a convenient interface to all functions of DAEMON Tools.

The Mount’n'Drive Manager bookmarks all your image files to give one touch access to mount and use them. The manager handles all mounting and un-mounting functions of the image files.

The Disc Imaging utility is a handy for creating image files in MDS or ISO format from physical disks. The data can also be compressed or encrypted with a password.

The program’s settings also lists a host of functions like auto-mounting, blocking un-mounting while image is in use, hot key settings, association settings with image formats and an Advanced Tab which handles copy protection features.

DAEMON Tools Lite (v4.30.4) is supported by Windows 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP /Vista/7.

Any of these three free virtual drive tools can stand up to the task of handling virtual disk jobs.We have previously featured a few other image mounting software’s on these posts…

How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily
Mount Zip Files, CD/DVD Images & Encrypt Folders
Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App

Which one is your pick? Let us know about your favorite tools to mount disks and ISO images.

Image Credit: bobbigmac

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• AcetoneISO – Easy ISO Manager for Linux (5)
• Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App (19)
• How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily (Windows) (12)
• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• Test Drive Linux Operating Systems with VirtualBox (7)

My own story began with the failure of the back up drive, which was the legacy of my old PC days. I figured I could survive several days without backing up my data before buying a replacement drive. Well, days turned to weeks and months turned to years, then my main hard drive finally failed. Then I remembered, “Ah, yes… I have to buy that second hard drive to back up my data.”

But the common condition of not backing up is because most people don’t want to go through the tedious process of constant “choose and copy and paste”. We need help from free back up utilities, and the first requirement is the ability to automate the whole process.

Travel Through Time

Starting from Leopard, Mac OS X comes with its own “set it and forget it” back up utilities called Time Machine. Over its lifespan, this application has been refined into a very capable utility and should be the first option of back up tools for common Mac users.

Activating it requires no rocket science. Just go to the System Preferences and click on Time Machine.

Users need to plug in the external drive, select it as the destination drive, and switch the Time Machine on – literally.

However, Time Machine can’t work with MS-DOS (FAT) formatted drives. So, if you want the external drive to also be available for Windows machines, you can’t do time travel.

Other disadvantages of using Time Machine are:

• The backup can’t be used to boot the machine
• Users can’t control when the process should take place
• Since this tool will record the state of the main drive all the time, it will (eventually) take up a very large space.

Attack Of The Clone

Another alternative is the free backup utility Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). I’ve tried the latest stable version (v. 3.2.1) and it works well under the new Mac OS X v 10.6.

However, the developer suggests that Snow Leopard users should upgrade their copy with the newer beta version (v. 3.3.b5 at the time of writing). You can do this by downloading it directly from the developer’s site or by using the “Update CCC” menu directly from the app.

As the name suggests, this free backup utility will create a clone of your disk. By default, CCC will back up everything from the main disk to the chosen destination. But this setting can be changed easily by choosing “Cloning Options”

If you choose “Incremental backup…“, you will be able to select which items should be excluded from the backup process by unchecking them. Give a check mark to the option “Delete items…” if you want to create the exact copy of your main drive, but if you only want to do a one-way backup, leave this option alone.

For the target disk; you can choose either an external disk, a new disk image, an already available disk image, or even a disk in a remote location.

The advantage of using a disk image as the target disk is that you can use non HFS+ formatted disks as the image location. It’s also possible to place the image on the main drive. The only disadvantage to this option is that you can’t boot from a disk image.

After everything is set, you can push that “Clone” button on the bottom-right corner of the windows.

The cloning process can also be scheduled easily through the “Scheduled Task…” menu (or by using the shortcut key Command + S)

Return Of The Clone

In these data cloning rituals, there’s another process as important as the backing up: restoring the data. This process should also be as painless as possible.

Fortunately, CCC makes the data restoration process as simple as switching the source – target disk. Too easy to be true, huh?

So do you back up your data regularly? Do you know of any other free alternatives for backing up a Mac? Share your thoughts using the comments below.

Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC)

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• IdleBackup – Use Your Idle Time to Backup Data (Windows) (6)
• How to Backup Your Computer With an Old Hard Disk (18)
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• 5 Ways To Clone & Copy Your Hard Drive (88)
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AcetoneISO is a feature-rich and complete software application to manage CD/DVD images in your Linux system. It runs the poweful fuseiso in the backend and provides a very user-friendly frontend for its users to handle the image file easily. If you have tried and used fuseiso before, you will know that it supports a large variety of CD/DVD images, including ISO, BIN, NRG, MDF and IMG, which in turn makes AcetoneISO a versatile and powerful tool.

Installation

AcetoneISO is found in the repository of all Linux distro, so it can be easily installed via the respective APT manager. Alternatively, you can also download the installation package for your distro.

When you first run AceToneISO, it will run you through the configuration process and help you to set up the environment for you to work in. There are some options that you are required to configure, including the ISO settings, selecting the default media player application, the file manager to use, and the storage directory.

To mount a CD/DVD image, you just have to select the “Open Image” option in the File menu. It will automatically mount the selected ISO file to the Virtual Drive folder in your Home directory. To unmount, simply highlight the respective file entry in AcetoneISO and click the unmount button.

Here is a warning: while testing the unmount feature in Ubuntu, I have found that I am unable to unmount the image within Nautilus. The only way to unmount the image is to use the unmount button in the AcetoneISO application. Some of you might be annoyed by this, but that is how it works.

Other than the default mounting and unmounting of image files, AcetoneISO also comes with other functionality to allow you to edit and manage your image files. Here are some of them:

Image conversion (with PowerISO)

AcetoneISO makes use of the great functionality found in PowerISO (free for Linux users) to provide some of the useful image conversion features to its users. You can now use it to convert image to ISO, convert Mac OS image (DMG file), extract image content to a folder (without mounting), generate ISO from CD/DVD and even create a ISO from folder(s).

Using the image conversion features require you to install PowerISO in your system. If you have not installed PowerISO, AcetoneISo will prompt you about it and help you to download and install.

Utilities

The Utilities menu comes with several functions such as mounting your image in a specified folder, generate the Md5-sum of the image, extract the boot image or even generate Cue for BIN/IMG images.

Archive manager

The archive manager feature is one powerful function in AcetoneISO. It allows you to split the image into several volumes (best used when the file size is too big), compress images, encrypt the images or even extract a RAR password-protected ISO (you will need to have the password before you can extract).

Working with Video/Audio

AcetoneISO can also be used to download, extract, convert video and audio component of an image. You can use it to rip a DVD (or generic video) to a xVid avi video file and convert a FLV (YouTube format) file to AVI. Better still, you can download YouTube and Metacafe videos right within the AcetoneISO application. Once you have downloaded the video, you can also extract the audio component from the video file (under the Audio menu). On a side note, you may also convert online video to mp3 audio using VidToMP3.

I am not sure how often you would have to deal with ISO or various image files, but when you do (and you are a Linux user), I am sure that AcetoneISO is the only tool you need to get everything done. It may not be the best yet, but it is getting close.

What other tools do you use to manage your image file in Linux? Shout out in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Mount CD or DVD Image Files Virtually Using A Portable App (19)
• How To Rip & Mount Multiple ISO Images Easily (Windows) (12)
• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• 3 Simple Free Virtual Drive Tools to Mount Disks & ISO Images (37)
• Mount Zip Files, CD/DVD Images & Encrypt Folders (10)

Downloading virtual disk images is probably the quickest and easiest way to test out a new operating system on VirtualBox.  Downloading and using a virtual disk image is the equivalent of installing a new physical hard drive into a computer, with the hard drive already having the operating system on it.

If you have two computers with identical underlying hardware, it should theoretically be possible to move the hard drive from one to the other.  That is exactly what you are doing when you download and use a virtual disk image on VirtualBox.  This is because a VirtualBox system on one computer is essentially identical to a VirtualBox system on another.

There is a website called VirtualBoxImages that has a number of free virtual disk images for free operating systems available to download.  You can simply download the virtual disk images, set up your virtual machine to use them, power up the virtual machine, and you’re all set!

There are more detailed instructions on VirtualBoxImages for using the VDIs.  The instructions on that page describe how to install their Puppy Linux VDI, but the steps are the same for other operating systems as well.  You will just use a different VDI file, rather than the one for Puppy Linux.  VirtualBoxImages has a number of free virtual disk images available, including:

• Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 4
• Xubuntu 9.04 Alpha 4
• Debian 5.0 RC2
• ReactOS 0.3.8
• OzOs 0.9 Desktop
• PC/OS Open32 Desktop 2009

They also have some disk images that are labeled as “premium downloads” where you pay a nominal fee to download them.  I’m not sure why they’ve decided to make some VDIs available for free and they require you to pay for others.  Some of the premium VDIs available are:

• OpenSolaris 2008.11 VDI
• openSUSE 11.1 Gnome VDI (Release)
• openSUSE 11.1 KDE (Release)
• Fedora 10
• CentOS 4.7 Server

Regardless of whether VirtualBoxImages has them labeled as premium or not, all of the VDIs they have for download are for free operating systems.  You may not be able to find the VDIs you want for free, but you can still download the installation media and install the operating systems yourself.

Although doing so involves more work on your part since you need to run the full installation, it allows you to avoid the cost of paying for one of the premium VDIs.  Here are some links for the installation disks:

• OpenSolaris 2008.11
• openSUSE 11.1
• Fedora Core 10
• CentOS 5

Once you download the installation disk images, the installation process is very much the same as installing Windows 7 onto VirtualBox.  You’ll just be using different file names for the installation disk images, and the process for installing the VirtualBox guest additions will be slightly different.

Have you installed any of these operating systems on VirtualBox?  Have you found .torrent links for any of VirtualBoxImage’s premium VDIs?  If so, please do share them with us!  Do not share .torrent files for operating systems that are not free.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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However, sometimes it may be inconvenient or impossible to burn a physical disk. There are a number of programs that will allow you to mount disk images files virtually as CD or DVD devices without having to burn them to physical disks (such as Pismo File Mount).

Unfortunately, most of these programs require the installation of drivers, creation of registry entries, and often ask you to reboot the machine. Such requirements make it difficult to use them as portable apps on a USB drive.

The Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel by Microsoft is the perfect solution for mounting disk images from a portable USB drive.

To use the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel:

• Download the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.1.1
• Extract the contents of the self-extracting excecutable onto your portable drive. Be sure that there are no spaces in the path to the directory you create (i.e. extract into a directory called X:\PortableApps\VCDRom, not X:\PortableApps\Virtual CD ROM). Otherwise, you will encounter problems later.
• Launch the VCdControlTool.exe program



• Click the Driver Control … button



• Click the Install Driver … button
• Browse to the location of where you extracted the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel files, and use the VCdRom.sys driver file.
• Click the Start button.
• Click the OK button.
• Click the Add Drive button. You should see a new drive letter appear in the Virtual CDRom Control Panel window.
• Click the Mount button.
• Navigate to the location of your disk image file (.iso, .udf, .cdfs, .jo, and .rock files are supported) and open it.

The disk image is now mounted on the new drive letter that was created. To restore the system to its original state:

• Click the Eject button.
• Select the drive(s) that were added, in the Virtual CDRom Control Panel window.
• Click the Remove Drive button.
• Click the Driver Control … button.
• Click the Stop button.
• Click the Remove Driver button.
• Click the OK button.

At a mere 32.5KB, the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel is extremely small and is very fast. It works on Windows XP and should also work on Vista if launched as the Administrator. If you keep disk images on your portable drive, you’ll definitely want to check it out.

Do you maintain disk images on your portable drive? What tool(s) do you utilize to use your images?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• How to Backup CD/DVDs to PC and Play them From Backup (10)
• AcetoneISO – Easy ISO Manager for Linux (5)
• Virtualization-Free In-Windows Linux Installation (15)
• Quick Overview: Free Media Players (17)
• Put your Life On a USB Stick [Linux] (8)