I swear by Clonezilla. I know Pat is a big Acronis lover, and it's definitely a good product, but it has its limitations. I guess you need to pick the right tool for the job. From Clonezilla's (much abbreviated) feature list:
* Free (GPL) Software.
* Filesystem supported: ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.
* LVM2 (LVM version 1 is not) under GNU/Linux is supported.
* Multicast is supported in Clonezilla SE, which is suitable for massively clone. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported in your clients.
* Based on Partimage, ntfsclone, partclone, and dd to clone partition. However, clonezilla, containing some other programs, can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.
* By using another free software drbl-winroll, which is also developed by us, the hostname, group, and SID of cloned MS windows machine can be automatically changed.
In a mixed estate of Unix, Linux, Windows and Mac machines, CloneZilla is my Swiss Army knife...
Our programming team incidentally use some of CloneZilla's tools to create clone workstations for our company, with great success.
