Clonezilla...use this before you make changes or upgrades!

[blueskydriver]

Hey Everyone,

Recently, I was told about Clonezilla, a backup/cloning tool by a simulation technician who works on multi-million dollar simulators for civilian and military identities. It is a free downloadable program that is pretty easier too use.

I had the hard drives of two computers of my fire truck simulator get knocked out. So, I reformatted the drives, and then cloned (or imaged) the hard drive of the third computer in the system using this program. Then, I used that image to clone onto the two failed systems. After that I just had to make changes to the BIOS to match the third system.

Took about 30 mins per machine and about 20 mins to download the bootable ISO CD disk of the program. I had to set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive and follow some onscreen instructions. Google the program for more information...

Hopefully, this will help some of you with the recent issues dealing with upgrading to Windows 10 or other problems before they happen. In other words use Clonezilla to make an image of your current system before you make changes or upgrade. This way you can go back without starting all over from scratch.

Best Regards,

John

[Joe Lavery]

Good call that John,

It's not one I'm familiar with but I'll certainly give it a go.

I use a free FTP client program called Filezilla for file transfer, which is also open source and as good as any paid product. In fact it's both a client and server product.
https://filezilla-project.org/

I'm all for the open source stuff where possible. 

Another free one I use for simple file backup is Syncronicity. This is useful for automatically backing up files to an external drive or a second PC, it's saved my bacon a couple of times when I've accidentally deleted something and not realised in time to do a file recovery.
http://synchronicity.sourceforge.net/

Hope these can be helpful to some!

Joe.