Creating system images with Clonezilla live

Clonezilla is a wonderful solution for backing up entire disks or partitions. Using Clonezilla, you can recover a server to bare-metal, including not only data, but also the entire operating system. Clonezilla essentially allows you to create hard disk images, similar to paid tools such as Acronis. It can be used as either bootable live media, or it can be installed on a server and clients can reach it via Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) boot.

Clonezilla itself is not actually related to Ubuntu in any way, but I bring it up in this book because this tool is extremely useful and a disk imaging solution is a very worthy aspect of a good deployment scheme. Using Clonezilla, you can use disk images to greatly reduce setup time, and also to back up complex setups. For example, imagine that you typically have a check-list of 20 configuration tweaks that need to be made to each server before you put one into production. With Clonezilla, you can...