windows 7 - Best way to Duplicate a Laptop's Hard Drive One-to-One

I have a Lenovo X61 Tablet computer, with a plain SATA drive inside. I have windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 dual booting on the computer. I want to back up both of these OS's, and their special partitions (Windows 7 has one, and of course the Linux Swap).

I want a one-to-one backup, all of my mission critical data is already backed up, but I would like to get a snapshot, and store it on a larger file server at home for quick recovery. What is the best approach to do this?

Answer

You could try using Clonezilla:

You're probably familiar with the
popular proprietary commercial package
Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource
counterpart, Partition Image. The
problem with these software packages
is that it takes a lot of time to
massively clone systems to many
computers. You've probably also heard
of Symantec's solution to this
problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate
Edition® with multicasting. Well, now
there is an OpenSource clone system
(OCS) solution called Clonezilla with
unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition
Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and
udpcast, allows you to do bare metal
backup and recovery. Two types of
Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla
live and Clonezilla SE (server
edition). Clonezilla live is suitable
for single machine backup and restore.
While Clonezilla SE is for massive
deployment, it can clone many (40
plus!) computers simultaneously.
Clonezilla saves and restores only
used blocks in the harddisk. This
increases the clone efficiency. At the
NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was
used to clone 41 computers
simultaneously. It took only about 10
minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system
image to all 41 computers via
multicasting!

Features of Clonezilla

• 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.

Using Clonezilla Live, you can create a LiveCD/USB drive that you boot to, and then image the partitions or the whole disk.