What is your recommended disk cloning tool?

Symantec Ghost used to be the tool to use, but from what I read, you no longer get a cli-client, unless you are willing to buy the Ghost Solution Suite at least 5 licenses and have another service running on a server somewhere.

So what tool do you recommend for disk cloning and image-based backup.

There are several OSS products, but it isn't entirely clear how well they support NTFS.

I am not really to just get a list of cloning. Instead, I would like to know what tool you use, why you choose that tool, and what you use it for.

After reading the answers I have a followup question. Given the tool you suggest, is it possible, and how easy is it to extract a particular file from the image without having to restore the entire image?

Solution 1:

Acronis has some good products.

We have been using their backup and restore products with success for about a year.

I believe they have a product just for cloning but their backup and restore software can also be used as a cloning tool.

Edit: Acronis has a trial period where you can try their products for a month. This really sold us because we were able to test and verify that the product did what we wanted it to do.

Edit: They have support for both Windows and Linux. Not really sure about Mac.

Solution 2:

I use dd. In the Windows world, you can get dd by installing Cygwin.

What dd does is allow sector-by-sector copying of a disk device to, say, an image file. Example usage:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=diskimage.img bs=1M

This copies from the first partition of the first hard drive to a file called diskimage.img, one megabyte at a time. (The Cygwin documentation has information on what the device names are.)