Clonezilla vs Veeam Agent for Linux

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.

Veeam Agent for Linux protects Linux instances running on premises or in public clouds. Its free edition supports backups of a whole computer, individual volumes or files, with recovery options including bare-metal, volume-level and file-level restores, plus bootable recovery media. For incremental backups, the agent combines kernel-module changed block tracking with built-in snapshots. It encrypts backup data on the source computer before the data leaves it. The agent integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication repositories and their file-level recovery capabilities. Backups can go directly to a Veeam-immutable hardened repository; the Linux backup solution also supports cloud or on-premises object storage and selected object-storage-based Veeam repositories. The free edition is distributed as RPM and DEB packages and supports default Linux distribution kernels from version 2.6.32 and above. Its Free plan costs nothing and allows one backup job, with several destinations and processing options excluded. Veeam offers a 30-day full-functionality commercial trial, but the Free edition does not include a commercial support program.