Clonezilla vs OSFClone

Clonezilla is a free, open-source program for imaging and cloning partitions and disks for system deployment, bare-metal backup, and recovery. Clonezilla live is suited to one machine; lite server and Clonezilla SE can clone many computers at once, with the site describing 40-plus computers. It saves and restores used blocks on supported file systems and uses sector-to-sector copying for unsupported ones. Listed file systems include Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, Minix, and VMware formats, including ext4, NTFS, APFS, and VMFS3/5. Images can be kept on a local disk or SSH, Samba, NFS, or WebDAV servers, and can be encrypted with AES-256. Clonezilla SE supports multicast, while lite server supports BitTorrent deployment. Clonezilla live supports BIOS or UEFI boot and MBR and GPT. It requires an x86 or x86-64 processor, 196 MB RAM, and a boot device. The destination partition must be at least as large as the source. Differential and incremental backups and online imaging are not implemented; images cannot be mounted or explored for direct individual-file recovery.

OSFClone is a free disk-imaging utility that boots from CD/DVD or USB and creates or clones disk images without relying on the installed operating system. It supports raw images and AFF, EWF, and dc3dd formats. The maker says images preserve unused sectors, slack space, file fragmentation, and undeleted file records. Users can compare a clone with its source using MD5 or SHA1 hashes, compress images, and attach forensic metadata such as case and evidence numbers, examiner name, description, and checksum. The product page describes cloning FAT, NTFS, and USB-connected drives. Its listed current download is a 373 MB ZIP for version 1.4.1000; USB installation needs a drive of at least 2 GB. The maker cautions that hardware, driver, and disk-state differences may contaminate evidence, and flags possible superblock changes when ext2/3/4 evidence drives are connected during startup. Some UEFI systems may not boot OSFClone. The software is licensed under GPL v3.0; its images can be mounted with PassMark OSFMount and analyzed with PassMark OSForensics.