 We are live welcome to episode 18 of the homelab show. This is Tom Lors and Jay LeCroy. Yes, and we're going to have a simpler episode Kind of it's clone zilla. It sounds simple enough. There's some new ones, but I think this is a tool That has been around forever and when you see the website, you'll scratch your head and go Well, that looks like the old days of the internet. I keep thinking every time I look up close I was trying to actually the first silly challenge was trying to find a logo that looks nice. I don't like their logo I'm sorry clone zilla if people from clones are listening. It's not I guess it's a logo. It's the shape that I don't understand Yeah, I'm not really sure what that is either. I'm a I'm a big fan of Godzilla So I figure if they're gonna have zilla in the name they should do something really cool with it But yeah, software is cool at least at least the software is good That's the one thing we will forgive all things we said about not having a modern fancy website But they definitely get the job done They're popular tool that we've talked about before and want to introduce a lot of people to it because as a Home lab and you want to migrate servers from one hypervisor to another because one of the use cases We'll be talking about here. It is a great tool and we I've been using it for years back when that website was modern It's probably when I started using it so Yeah, it was actually the first tool I think I've ever used well I used Norton ghost for a short period of time, but I don't really count it because it was short As soon as the place I was working for discover cone zilla is like Norton ghost who and yeah It just it gets the job done before we dive into those details We do need to thank a sponsor show and that is Linode We both have been longtime Linode users J runs the quite a few things a little you've done a lot of demo videos on it My god, I I have so many things. I have two accounts. I have a demo account. I have my main Learnlinux tv account. I have you know this particular the website for this podcast is hosted there My website is hosted there my youtube channel's website is hosted there the forums the wiki I could go on I'm all in it works great. Yes our sponsor has Graciously offered, you know, not only the sponsor show but offered all of our audience Some free credits and things like that to get started with the know There's an offer code down in the links, but it's yeah, we really recommend it And if you're not sure what to do with those Check out my channel or j-channel for a few different ideas of things you can run in the cloud like your own VPN server because why rely on someone else's you just build your own You know cloud vpn server But we have a few more ideas that we'll be covering on the homelab show for some things I have some bridging ideas for people who are stuck behind carrier grade nat and things like that So either way gets your get signed up for loans. So you're prepared when we do those videos and uh, thanks again for lino for sponsoring the show Now let's dive into cloning. So if you didn't guess by the name if you've never heard the word clone zilla You can probably guess that it's a cloning software Absolutely is and um, it's not the thing is that's what that that is what it is But there's so many other things that it can do that i'm going to talk about that I'm thinking at least some part of our audience hasn't thought about yet Because i've used clone zilla for some other use cases too that are cloning related But are kind of a clever spin on that and I say clever But I mean these are bullet points things that you can do in clone zilla They're not hidden features or anything like that just things that people don't immediately think about when they run it and First of all, let's talk about the need for cloning real quick I think most people know why they might want to do this. So I won't spend too much time on it Having a base image is usually a good idea You know, obviously we're probably going to automate things vansible or whatever our chosen thing is But it's really cool to have a few things baked into an image because that way There's a couple of things already there that you don't have to do after you restore it, which is always good You create that image after you set it up the way you like it Just take the image you restore the image and you could deploy that image and um and tom I think you use clone zilla for penguin and or at least in the past, right? Yeah, and that's one of the really good use cases is we had to create A bunch of laptops with all the same image because we were helping out with a python class They wanted to teach python And one of the easy ways to do this and this is a cool feature is it supports multicasting So instead of doing a one-to-one image You can build a multicast server where you basically take one computer get it perfectly set up how you want And then you take all the clones of the clients and kick off a simultaneous multicast And when multicasting is interesting because this is what allows you to have like a one-to-many relationship So it's not stopping and verifying each bit from system a to system b You set up system a the original system and you say Blanket this message out on this same local subnet using the multicast and all of them at the same time can grab that image And all simultaneously clone. These are some of the really cool ways to Make this work now. I will admit it is probably not the best tool. We should probably be sure this is the beginning It is not the best microsoft cloning tool It can work, but there's probably Microsoft especially if you're talking like when we talk p2b physical to virtual But you want to do a conversion of an existing machine microsoft actually has some of their own tools for doing that For p2b conversion if you look at my channel like you know p2b microsoft You'll find i've covered that tool before so that way we don't segue too much into that There's also some dedicated tools like a cronus as popular specifically for setting up Things like microsoft cloning Yeah, I agree and i'm going to talk a little bit a little bit about what's required to make clone zilla work in that way I agree. There's there's definitely better tools there So okay, so we know what clones, you know what use case clone zilla serves here So what exactly is it now when we think of a linux distribution? We generally think of like debbie and ubuntu and and so on You know we could install it on our laptop on our server We can have a graphical user interface if we want to But there's specialty distros that serve a specific purpose and clone zilla is one of those when you You know boot it from a iso image you could write that I mean you write that image to a flash drive preferably because let's be honest That's faster than dvds. Does anyone still use dvds anymore? I never really like cdrs and dvdrs, but you create a bootable flash drive That is clone zilla the software is on there you boot your server your laptop whatever it is from that And it's live. It's called clone zilla live when you download it because that's what it is There is a server component, which i'll get to but for right now We're just going to talk about the live component Now when you boot from that It basically just asks you a series of questions. What do you want to do? Do you want to take an image? Do you want to restore an image? You make that selection and i'll get to some of those features in a moment But basically it's just menu driven and you navigate it. There's a beginner mode. There's an advanced mode There's a reason why you might want to consider advanced mode that i'll get to But um at the very beginning of the menu most people will just let it time out I think it starts at like 10 seconds it comes down and it starts and then it starts asking you questions But if you look at that menu before you do that, you'll you'll notice There's a I forgot what it's called or how they worded it that essentially allows you to cash the entire flash drive and ram And that you can remove the flash drive after it finishes booting and put it in another computer You could you could you know launch that computer boot it and choose that same option load to ram And from one flash drive you could have a bunch of computers that are running clone zilla in that instance Which is the way that I always do it because I don't know why I guess it just became habit I always use that option And so it's cached in ram and you use it that way and then at that point You have to decide what you want to do. Do you want to take an image restore an image? But we need to back up a little bit. Where do you put your images? And there's many different options here because when you take an image it's a clone of the hard drive obviously So you can insert another flash drive if you want to and store your image there an external hard disk I've seen many people do that You could actually mount a samba or nfs share on your network Which is going to be very common in the enterprise and I think a lot of home lab people do that as well They might have a file share with a bunch of images on it. I do. I actually have one of my truenas So then you just tell clone zilla. I want to take an image And then you tell it where your network sure You know store is if you do want to use a network store And it mounts that store and then it just when you create the image That's where it ends up and then you can reverse the process by booting or just going back to the menu And just choosing the restore option and restore an image that way So that's the most basic level of feature set there But um, we'll definitely cover some additional things too that go way beyond that that was oversimplified But that's generally what it's for Yeah, and one of the reasons you use clone zilla is right away people mentioning some of the more In-depth programs for managing images and stuff like that in enterprise environments This is for simplicity and like Jay said, it's a quick download it to a single drive good drive to have in your Tool set and you have this usb drive. You're going to boot off it You're going to be able to clone something really fast And it doesn't have the complexities of setting up a dedicated server for it Now if you're going to do something repetitively and your job is to image computers every day Yeah, learn one of the more enterprise level systems or go through the complexity of setting it up A lot of times what you run into is you're like, oh got our laptop here I need to just get the data from here onto the drive over on this other machine and Pop out your clone zilla matter of fact one usb boot drive load in a ram eject drive plug into second machine Plug network cable in them kick off transfer between them and now without even turning a screwdriver You have now successfully started the cloning process from one computer to another And this works really well in the linux world Yep. Um, so a couple of tips before we go any further The first tip is recreate your clone zilla media every year minimum preferably every six months every year is okay, too There's many reasons why you might want to do that because they're they don't just release new versions Just because they think it's fun. They release new versions that have new features obviously, but more importantly They up the kernel version and driver versions in every release So if you just buy uh, I don't know you buy a laptop right now and you want to you know Restore your image onto that laptop. It's a brand new computer But your clone zilla flash drive was created three years ago Guess what? It's probably not going to detect the network card at all and your capabilities are going to be very limited Um, one of the things that clone zilla will do if it detects that there's grub in the image It's going to reinstall grub for you But if it's really really out of date, then you're going to have an out of date grub install in the master boot record Some really interesting things will happen there I would say as long as you up or you know, you recreate your clone zilla media every year with the latest version You shouldn't really run into a problem If you're like me and you're insane and you actually image arch Linux machines and I do You probably want to um, recreate that media every six months to make sure you're on the latest version Um, so I know quite a few people get a kick out of it. You you image arch or you are you mad? Yeah, I am So that's the first tip the second tip I'll tell you guys is if you are going to be imaging or creating an image of a Linux server or install Which I'm sure most of you will be Absolutely install cloud in it on that machine before you image it. I'm not saying you have to Understand or learn cloud in it. I do have a video on that if you guys want to But honestly, I'll all I'm saying is just install the package I'm not saying you have to understand it just install it because The default for cloud in it is it's going to reset the ssh host keys That's important because if you don't do that and you just roll that image out to every single server Every single server is going to have that host key. Um, or actually the same host keys And you'll get that message that something's wrong here the I forgot how it's worded I'm sure you've seen a tom where it's like known host file um detects that the Key is the same but the server's not and just throws a fit rightfully so Um, that definitely have cloud in it installed It could still come up with that message the first time but um cloud in it is smart enough to regen that after the first boot So you should be fine So just have that installed if you plan on rolling this image out to a bunch of virtual machines Might be a good idea to have your virtual machine tools installed in the image as well So that's one less thing that you have to do and also the um, you know Virtual machine you're creating will already have those tools Installed so those are a few quality of life tips that i'm going to give you guys for starting out with it That I think just you know makes sense. Yeah in a use case, you know prior to 2020 I should say a use case that was really popular for us is we've helped out Local conferences and we've mentioned penguin count a couple times in this show Which is a local tech conference and we've always helped out in in the aspect of getting their labs ready And they're one-time events They're not really worth building a specific deployment server for because it's like look we need a bunch of these laptops with this image On it real quick so we can teach this class we're going to have You know on friday at two o'clock We have a a python class someone's teaching and when we're then they're done with the class type thing That's where we've actually found a lot of You know those one-off jobs like this not just the base cloning But some of those Kind of advanced but still not worth setting up a whole imaging server for The other nice thing about it like we mentioned before is you can do all these different mounts of nfs or even smb This actually if you have some piece of hardware where you know, you can't hype You can't put it in a hypervisor. It can't be virtualized. It has to run natively on here You're looking for you know what before I mess with this thing. I want to just make a clone of it It works really well for you know having your smb share and saying pop and clone zilla and Back it up to an image and then you can create a series of easy image backups And then I see when you're doing this you're doing it At a level above the operating system because you're booting it off some type of live image So there's never a worry about any files being open or anything that you have a cloned image of this machine that can be restored Pretty easily as needed Yep, and another use case that I'll give you guys that's a little humor So I'm going to put a humor spin on this is you know, I'm sure many people listening You know, you have that windows laptop that shipped with windows But you don't want to run windows on there. You want to run some linux distribution But you're also kind of concerned that if you're vendor like if you send it in for repair if something goes wrong That they're going to say yeah, you're using linux. We're not going to help you Absolutely Image the hard drive take an image of the hard drive before you install linux that has the manufacturer You know that they're blessed windows installation on the hard drive Take an image of that And then you can install linux and if you ever have to send that machine in Just restore that hard drive with that original windows install Like what linux there was never linux here. What are you talking about? That's usually if i'm going to run linux on a machine on a machine That didn't actually come with linux i'm i'm going to take an image of that operating system originally because you never know if you might actually need that Also, somebody in the live stream mentioned that you can clone the you know one hard drive directly to another which is true So earlier I mentioned you could plug in an external hard drive if you want to you can store all your images on there You can take like 10 images if you if you can hold them But you could actually just you know write the image directly to the hard drive itself And then plug that hard drive into a server and then that hard drive is a clone of the original So you could basically play around with the source and the destination whether you're storing images on a storage medium To have a collection of images You want to just directly write to a hard drive or you want to send it to a samba share nfs share whatever it is you you have full flexibility there now One use case I want to talk about a little bit is file recovery Now this doesn't always work But I have had this work a lot of times and I actually I got to be honest. I don't understand why this works But back when I was doing pc repair. I would have people bring a computer to me that doesn't boot and You know I diagnosed the hard drive. I think back then I was running like the manufacturers tools that you know How they came with an iso image for like seagate and wester digital you can do a health check and Hard drives failing the health check, but it works good enough to where the bios can read it So I would take an image of it with clonezilla I've replaced the hard drive with a brand new one restore the image And what would happen and these are windows machines and tom, maybe you can explain this I don't know if you know the answer Once it booted windows would run a check disk and it was fine It booted perfectly fine every single time My line of thinking is if something in the bootloader was in a bad sector clonezilla is not going to be able to read that bad sector and repair it but somehow for me I would say three out of five times it was totally repairing it and I actually saved a server that The admin didn't back up ever literally ever Critical and they were freaking out and I just record, you know I just captured an image with clonezilla restored it to another hard drive replaced it And they were just amazed now that the key takeaway here for this to work You got to go to advanced mode In advanced mode There's an option that clonezilla will say something like If if you run into a bad sector keep going like if clonezilla runs hits a bad sector It's going to keep on it's going to skip it and keep taking an image If you don't select that option it will fail in this situation because the hard drive has issues So as soon as clonezilla hits that issue. Hey, I don't know. I'm not doing anything here I'm just going to abort if you check that box keep running It'll just skip that sector and keep going and that's key to this idea because Um, you know, again, if you don't do that, it won't work So then you can record that image and then restore it. It still might not work. Let's be honest But if you have no other alternative Um, there's that um, if anything forensics related take an image Well, there's yeah, there's a lot of extra so windows fault tolerance is kind of what's part of an issue here If you clone a drive, um And there's a section of the drive that may not have very relevant data Like let's say a collection of crappy old log files of installs Stuff that doesn't really need to be touched. Maybe some of the rollback information We don't really know what part of the drive couldn't be read But windows if it can't read a part it says i'm stopping here windows is really bad about that Uh of saying no go beyond we we don't need those files for the operating system not critical. So my Hypothesis as to why it works is uh, it it skipped over those files Those files are still corrupt. You can't you know, bring them back from the corrupted dead that they are They're in the bit bucket in the sky But because they weren't in critical to the actual function of the operating system and now they're not flagged as bad Even though they would just be a garbled mess if you were to try to open those files Windows goes on whatever they're there integrity check says they're there because when you clone it It doesn't check integrity. It just says i'm cloning all of this so to speak Well, it skipped it. So it doesn't check integrity. But you told to skip over that part of it So that's my hypothesis as to why that would work Yeah, no, that's probably it. Um, I mean nowadays I use spin right a lot but That I mean if the hard drive is physically bad that that in and of itself is only going to get you so far But we have tools and I think it's important to look at these tools in ways other than What they're marketed for I mean clonzilla is not marketed as a file recovery utility There's other live ISO images that are marketed for that like rescue CDs I think rescue is another one. Yep. That's what I did a video on that's clonzilla compatible by the way And we have all these tools But that's a really cool thing to be able to do in clonzilla to just at least give that a shot If nothing else, I mean the worst-case scenario you'll lose an hour of your time or however long it takes to record that image Another feature that I really like is the ability to create your very own recovery media Yes, and this is cool because You know you create a flash drive and set it up with clonzilla on there you boot from it You capture that image of your machine you store it on a network share You can then use clonzilla to take that image and create a bootable image that has the Excuse me bootable clonzilla image that has the hard drive image built in And if you write that to a flash drive You literally just plug it into a computer you boot and it'll say Are you sure you want to wipe your entire hard drive and restore this image you press y and enter you're done Literally, that's it. You can you can have a recovery key for your computer It's not simple after you create it when I used to do pc repair like I think over 15 years ago Anytime somebody brought me like parts and would tell me to build their windows gaming computer I would do it but after I got all the drivers installed and windows installed I would create an image of it. I would give them a bootable flash drive with their windows installed their license Their drivers all their stuff on there So if they ever have a problem all they have to do is is you know insert that flash drive and You know restore their hard drive. That's another thing that clonzilla can do that a lot of people may not realize And one of the things that you know, we've talked earlier in early episodes about tools like ansible and really automating your deployments That's great goals to get to clonzilla is a good in between So many of you are you know, we're broad spectrum of audience that we have Someone would go, you know what? I'm ready to put linux on my desktop But boy that I watched jay's video on how he does ansible pull and builds the system almost automated I'm not quite there yet. And when you're new to linux, you're more likely to break it more often So this can also be uh a good way to Build those images so you have an easy way to restore. So as your experimentation goes And uh, you're playing with linux and you break something like jay said you could quickly create it Um now I think this is worth noting and I've seen it come up in the chat of what about if it's on different hardware Uh linux is very different than windows when you swap things on different hardware. So linux is much more forgiving I don't windows 10 has finally gotten where linux has been for a long time When you swap things other than like your network interfaces sometimes happen to be rediscovered linux is rather tolerant of swapping hardware Windows in the past was not windows 10 has become much better other than Bugging you for some reactivation windows 10 goes. Oh look different hardware And it's tolerant. Of course sys prep is windows actual proper methodology to rebuild The hkey local hardware and re enumerate everything properly But even when you don't windows actually has become rather Much better than it ever was when it comes to that I can actually explain that because I dealt with that a lot. I used to work You know windows help desk a long time ago and we used clone zilla for windows You know restores are actually creating a windows image and deploying it across different pieces of hardware Now the first problem with windows and I don't know if this is why it's better now I don't really know what windows 10 has done to make it better But what the issue used to be is ahci mode for your sata hard drive Which is the better mode to be in if you have an option nowadays everything is What it should be because there's really no choice. There's you know without getting too into detail You install a hard drive it works, right? So back before then you had to Choose ide mode ahci mode raid mode for the hard drive And if you restored an image created an ide mode To a computer that in the bios has a hard drive set to ahci mode is going to blue screen Same with raid so you have to match the settings accordingly But it still might not work because other things can cause it to blue screen as well So nowadays i'm thinking windows 10. There's really just an option. I'm assuming maybe not as many options So it's working more often because it's just usually going to be the correct option I mean when's the last time anyone's gone into the bios to make sure their hard drive access mode is the correct one I don't think i've done that in like at least five years or more um So the issue with windows is you have to sys prep First before you can load it onto another piece of hardware what sys prep will do If you check the generalized button Is it's actually going to well generalize it it's going to take the machine-specific stuff out and when you restore that image It's going to come up with that windows um setting up your device with that Little dots and all those things on the screen that um or that new one where it's like we're getting things ready for you And the screen changes color. It's going to basically reactivate that um, I don't know if sys prep was further neutered in Windows 10, but I know that they in vista they kind of neutered that a bit We could still use it for generalization as far as I know And that was the key when I did that it would work on any piece of hardware I would just have to manually add the drivers back in there because it's going to purge those And then at that point it became a great tool for Deploying windows images probably not the best like you mentioned the cronus is better And then microsoft has their own tools at the time They wanted me to install a four gigabyte application just for the privilege of creating an image and i'm like really I'll just keep using clone zilla and I found a way to make it work and I did Um, honestly if you're in the microsoft camp and you're learning microsoft stuff You should probably do it their way But clone zilla does work as long as you assist prep But one problem with sys prep is you can only do it three times and then they won't let you do it anymore Then yeah, because that's what you have to do. Well, you can but you're just a registry key. You have to flip so Yeah, so what I did back in my windows health test days Is I set up a virtual box vm with a 20 gigabyte hard drive and I installed windows on there I didn't activate it didn't put the license in there Just put the company specific tweaks in it and I captured the image with clone zilla The reason why I chose a 20 gig hard drive is because one of the flaws of clone zilla Is that you can go up but not down meaning if your image was created on a 500 gigabyte disk on windows or whatever your OS is and you have another computer that has a 250 gigabyte disk. Yeah, good luck with that You can't go down you can go up meaning you can take that image created a 500 gig drive restore it on a computer If they one terabyte drive or something like that that should work So I created a image or excuse me a vm with a 20 gig drive And every computer in the company is going to have at least 40 at that time To give you an idea how long ago this was so that was fine. It would work I wouldn't have to run into that problem. I would just install the drivers when I was done and I was good to go So I was able to have that one image that would do all the things But yeah with windows you have these other things that you have to do that with linux You just image it but linux itself needs the host keys changed Um ubuntu for example has the machine id that you would have to zero out because if the machine id is the same It's going to start fighting for the same ip address Like all your servers which is weird because you think the mac address is what's going to come through But something to do with machine id long story just zero that out So there's some things to do on both sides But that's kind of the fun of learning this stuff right because you're learning some of these deeper internals of the operating systems That you normally wouldn't even be exposed to yeah Now a few people asked in fair assessment here and I think you said you did a review of rescue zilla And rescue zilla is pretty cool But it doesn't it's kind of like a more basic version of clone zilla clone zilla and the reason you know And if you go to rescue zilla, they say it works with chrome zilla based on clone zilla It's clone zilla light if you want any of the real advanced features beyond just owning That's where you want to go with clone zilla So there is a difference between them But if you're looking for a ui and I think rescue zilla is also a good product and Throw that in your tool tool kit as well. It's it's got uh, they printed up the ui on top of it So that's where their value add is and it's free as well. So rescue zilla is also a nice system Yep, and somebody in the in the live stream mentioned that you know since you have to You know since this prep is going to purge the licenses for you You know when you when you actually create the image there That's not a problem my opinion. I feel that that's still that that's still a gold image If all I have to do is spend 30 seconds adding a license to it after install I could do that. It's certainly a lot better than spending three or four hours building the machine from scratch And another thing too is if your license key changes if you with your volume license agreement or something changes there I mean, do you really want to redo your entire image just to update the the license there? I mean, I don't and that's a rabbit hole that you'll go into Or you can go into with cloning and imaging is that you might just want everything to be done To where you have nothing to do after installing it But that's a rabbit hole where you'll find yourself recreating that image Constantly for every little thing and then you're you're doing more work Maintaining the image then the image actually saves you when you are rolling it out So that's why I usually recommend do the minimum amount of stuff and then something like ansible And windows group policy or whatever that can take the base install and move it up to where you want it to be In fact, if you get into ansible you can actually do the initial bootstrap in the image And then when you restore the image it's going to catch it up to where all the other servers are So I wouldn't try to put everything in its mother in the image just the bare essentials that you need to actually Get yourself in a good state in order to be in a good starting point Now I do want to at least Brush on the concept of the clonezilla durable or drbl server Um that they have I'm not going to spend too much time on this because I kind of I've fallen away from it now Cool history lesson That was one of the first videos I ever did on my youtube channel was all about clonezilla because I was already using that at work at the time So naturally setting up a clonezilla server seemed like a no-brainer I think I've since deleted those videos actually because they changed it on me and then I recreated the videos they changed it And recreated the videos that changed. Okay. I'm done. I'm just done Like I don't know what it is why things keep changing. It's like I put out a video It's like worse than arch linux I create arch linux tutorials Just keep that in mind and the durable server was thinking more than arch linux is changing So I'm like I can't I can't deal with this. So then I came to the conclusion my personal opinion Is that the clonezilla? Durbal server is just not worth it. I mean Maintaining an entire server with pixie boot when a lot of us are already Setting up a pixie server with iso images anyway Yes, there's there's additional benefits of clonezilla server I'm not saying that it has no reason to exist But I'm just looking at the maintenance cost to keep it running Is it really that big of a deal to boot from a flash drive and pull from a network share? I don't think so Like I said, you could just set up a pixie boot server that boots clonezilla Also a boon to also debian and boots all your favorite iso images if you want to it doesn't have to be clonezilla specific But that option does exist if you want to look into that I'm not going to cover it in today's episode of this podcast because I think it's just a waste of time in my opinion No offense to clonezilla. I think you know inserting a flash drive or booting from a pixie server A generic pixie server is more than adequate for um, you know imaging a bunch of computers yeah The um Multicasting one like I said that's that's been enough for me. I've never really dug deep into the server side of it Um, I've I've learned from you talking about it that it's less than great Yeah, well, I mean it's it's actually fine when you set it up It's just one of those things where what I what I don't think a lot of people realize is that having a server is pretty cool And especially in home lab you could you could end up with like 12 different things Which is great because you learn 12 different things, but then Oh, I have to maintain it. I have to upgrade this one. I have to upgrade that one Next thing you know, you're doing a lot of work to keep everything updated So if you're going to deploy something in the home lab I think that it's going to in my opinion have to have a return on investment when it comes to time Meaning it's saving you so much time that maintaining this is okay Because the amount of time that it's saving you More than pays for it with clonezilla. I mean honestly in a home lab You're probably just going to use a clonezilla image if you have a problem Your laptop dies your server's hard drive dies you restore the image. How often does that happen? If you have to maintain your clonezilla server every month, but you only have hardware failures every year Where's the return and you know what I'm saying? So at that point you could kind of Make the conclusion that the the cost in time is negative But of course again, there's other benefits I'll leave that up to the listening audience to decide if it's worth their time And they might decide that yeah the the features that this gives me Especially if they're using it in a large enterprise with a large fleet of desktops and laptops Now that's where you could probably start to see some benefit But in the home lab you probably only have four or five computers So you're you're probably not going to see a benefit. Yeah And in one of the challenges like I mentioned in the beginning the go clonezilla clonezilla or even rescue zillas They have a simpler way to do it without dealing with the nuance. I mean don't get me wrong I am not telling you to stop diving into how to set up UEFI and PXE boot. That's a fun learning experience And understanding how to get them a properly set up, you know tftp to serve the image to Get all that configured. It's definitely A neat venture and if you want to learn that skill, please do But you also if you just want to get something done and you don't have time to learn that skill You're like, yeah, I'm probably not going to do this in my career path I'm a developer and I just want to be able to reimage your system really quickly in my home lab here Then it may be another solution and it's one of the things that we cover of these tools We like to talk about who that target audience is and when to think about this I mean sometimes the goal of one aspect to your home lab is to take and learn Development, oh, maybe you want to career as a developer Maybe you want to career as a you know dev ops or maybe you want to career in working in the actual industry Where you do the imaging where you're the maintainer so to speak of and my friend actually does for a bank He worked and deployed thousands of laptops and he had you know product life cycles They had to manage and image lots of them Well, that's where he did set up a windows deployment server to create a universal way to have every banker with every sales person The bank had exactly the same laptop with exactly the same software and then manage all licensing So you can't think about where your career path and if your home lab is maybe just for fun Which it is for a lot of people and I do a lot of things for fun and a job Or if you just need a cool tool to get something done because it helps you spend more time on the part of the career You want to focus on Exactly right. I think that that's key here is the usefulness. You know depends on your use case and yeah I think I think as long as you don't go crazy and Remaster your clone zilla image every time you change your desktop wallpaper. So long as you're not doing that I think you're it's good. You have a good base installation to start with and I think that's what it gives you And clone zilla is just an awesome thing Um, another thing I think this is probably one of the last if not the last things that I'll mention here We touched on migrating You know a machine to a server for example to a vm or a vm to vm or server to vm Now if you're going from a physical server to a virtual machine something like clone zilla is pretty cool It works just fine. Like I mentioned earlier, you'll have to sys prep your server first I recommend you take a clone zilla image of your server before you sys prep I have seen sys prep fail and even if it fails that knocks out one of your three sys prep allowances that you get Uh, microsoft isn't kind. Oh, yeah, we understand that it failed. So we're not going to count that against you No, you try to it failed you lose one right then and there so as long as you Yeah, as long as you image the server before even attempt to sys prep, that's best. Yes, it's more time consuming It's the best way to do it You can google and I threw not I didn't throw the link in there But at least the I threw a link to it's each key local machine system slash setup slash status slash sys prep status That's the key you change after there's uh three or more to my knowledge It still exists um in the latest iteration of windows It was at least in the earlier versions of 10 to my knowledge the latest iterations of 10 That's still the same location of it But if you google it you can find how to switch the registry key after you've done a couple sys preps on windows Yep Yep, sure can so after you sys prep as long as the destination hard drive is the same or larger You can use cloning for that and you you could do that now if you're going from a hypervisor to hypervisor um, I would recommend to first see If the hard disk itself is a standard virtualization format that's understood by multiple hypervisors If it's not proprietary to that hypervisor You might be able to just copy that image after you shut down the server to the destination Import it and then create a vm with an exist existing disk You don't even need clonzilla at that point So if you if you have tools that are available If the hard drive is a standard format between the two are recognized between the two Then clonzilla is just an unnecessary step But if the target does not recognize the hard drive format or virtual disk format of the source clonzilla could be a Very good Utility for making something like this happen So in that sense, I would recommend that you use clonzilla if you have to but just always use the Platform tools first if they do it you want them to do before you add another tool Right, and that's you the best way to do it. Yeah In the example is going to be like if you're using something like kvm or you have different qmu drives There's there's utilities to make that conversion But if you're moving from something like hyper v and you want to move over to xcp and your proxbox The conversion is a little bit muddier But if you just boot off that particular vm budo clonzilla budo clonzilla on your incoming hypervisor as well Tell them to talk to each other via ip. Hopefully they have a 10 gate connection because that makes a big difference And then you can then transfer that system From where it is to where you want it to be and this is an easy way To deal with kind of hypervisor thing when you know the exporter of the backup tools I mean alternatively you could use and there are backup tools and just use whatever your backup tool of choice is But clonzilla has always been kind of an easy go to so I don't even have to deal with Like the nuance of it's like start here source start here destination send Yeah, it's great. Just make sure you remove the hypervisor tools that were used in the source Before you migrate it because having the vmware tools running on xcp and g. I don't know what would happen there But it's probably just a good idea to remove them. Yeah, I do do uninstall those That is something I have I've run into that before where it just kind of it was it was causing some unusual hang ups And it made it difficult to remove them once we had it on the other server because someone Okay, maybe me was the someone forgot to remove them ahead of time Okay There you go All right, I think that wraps it up for clonzilla that covers all stuff Obviously, it's easy enough to check out at clonzilla.org Check out their site that's looked the same. They do keep it up to date It just is the most basic text site with a menu Down on the left like every site used to look in the 90s I actually kind of like it because I go there and i'm like I didn't have any confusion as to where to find everything Yeah, well, it's effective. It's it's it's not the most beautiful thing in the world But it's a there's a lack of graphics on that website, which is fine. I see that's good. I'm okay with this. Don't change that Not very far removed from geocities back in the day, but at least I don't at least as far as I know There's no frame. So that's a good thing on that. Yeah, there's no pop-up. There's no pop-up. So we haven't gotten that far back Yeah, we haven't gone that far back and I have videos on my channel about clonzilla live rescue zilla and a number of others So if you just search clonzilla on my channel watch the most recent video, you should be fine Yeah, so that's definitely um Definitely, uh, we we've got some resources. We'll leave down the links below and thank you again for lino for sponsors And thank for all of you for enjoying this uh, and joining us here 141 people So if you could hit that like button if you're watching this live, uh, if not, we'll uh, see you on the next episode and thanks Thank you