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Clonezilla Live

The open-source workhorse. Ugly, free, and it clones anything.

Free & open source   Last verified August 2026

Licence
Free / open source
Price
Free (GPL)
Platform
Bootable Linux ISO — clones Windows, Linux, macOS drives
Current version
3.3.3-15 (July 2026)
Developer
NCHC Free Software Labs, Taiwan
Clones the Windows system disk for free
Yes
Clone to a smaller drive
With effort
Official site
clonezilla.org

The verdict

The most capable free cloner there is, and the only one on this list with zero feature gates. You pay for it in usability: everything happens in a blue text menu with terminology like device-device and -k1. If you can read carefully and follow a guide, it will not let you down.

Who it is for

Anyone comfortable booting from a USB stick and reading prompts carefully; IT technicians cloning many machines; people cloning Linux systems.

Strengths

  • Genuinely free with no upsell, no account, no telemetry
  • Handles NTFS, ext4, XFS, Btrfs, HFS+, APFS (basic), FAT and more
  • Only copies used blocks on supported filesystems, so it is fast
  • Multicast mode can image dozens of PCs at once over a LAN
  • Runs outside Windows, so no locked files and no VSS problems
  • Actively maintained — releases land every few months

Limitations

  • No graphical interface; the text wizard is intimidating on first use
  • Cloning to a smaller disk is awkward and often needs manual partition resizing first
  • One mis-selected device and you overwrite the wrong drive — there is little hand-holding
  • No scheduling, no incremental backups, no Windows-side integration

Worth knowing

Clonezilla Live is the version most people want: a bootable ISO you write to a USB stick. Clonezilla SE (Server Edition) is a separate product for mass deployment over a network.

The interface

Placeholder for a screenshot of Clonezilla Live
Screenshot slot. Vendor screenshots are copyrighted, so none are bundled with this site — install Clonezilla Live, capture its window yourself, save the file into assets/img/screenshots/ and swap the src above. See the README in that folder.
Before you clone anything The destination drive is erased completely. Confirm which physical disk is which — by size, model number and serial, not just by drive letter — and keep a separate backup of anything irreplaceable. Our pre-clone checklist takes about fifteen minutes and prevents most disasters.

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