Looking for Professional cloning software

After recommending clonezilla to many people and using it in my labs for many customers, I am in a position of looking for something a little more robust.

I need to find a software program that will clone a drive without installing anything on it or even time-stamping the disk or otherwise "touching" it (besides reading the data). The software must also provide a report of the clone process including a message of completion (not just a pop up window that says "Clone complete").

Requirements:

Must not be a windows product since just the act of booting with the drive attached to a windows box will change the drive (a time stamp or some other file is written to the drive), and my customer will have to go through another 6 months of validation testing with the FDA. (windows would be OK if it did not write to the master disk)

Capable of cloning fairly quickly.

Some sort of verification phase that will test the new drive against the old drive and create a report indicating that it passed or failed.


Thanks in advance!

Wow .. thats a pretty tall order, but there has to be something out there that can do it. This is a bit of a departure from most of the imaging software I have used in the past. Most of the stuff I deal with is ways to get workstations imaged and back on line in short order. This sounds more like you want to attach a drive to a machine clone it, then remove it, connect a new drive, rinse and repeat. Is that correct?

If you are cloning actual machines and not just HDD's, we use a system called FOG. All of our machines are set to PXE boot. The machine's PXE boot a linux kernel that will check a DB to see if there are any tasks associated to that MAC address. If there is it will begin the imaging process. It uses NFS to transfer the files over the network so its pretty fast but still not as fast as if you were cloning from drive to drive. I know you can do some custom reporting, and its open source so you could build your own reports, but it would make more sense to find a commercially supported product.

I know there are some hardware drive duplicators out there, that you just insert your drives into and hit go. Some of them will do multiple drives at once. That might be a route to check into as well.

Good luck, and I would be curious to see what you find out.

Sounds to me like you're more looking for a forensics tool, not a standard imaging tool. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your requirements, but all the talk about connecting drives separate to the machine, not altering the data on the disk at all, and the detailed record of when and what you're imaging at all screams 'forensics' at me. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with a tool like what you're looking for, but you might find something if you shift your search to cover computer forensics tools in addition to the normal imaging utilities.

i don't think it has to do with forensics.
he mentioned something about validation testing with the fda. it sounds to me like it is a just a product that needs to be exactly identical to the original so it doesn't have to go back through the testing phase. we have similar issues here when components go obsolete and we have to have to re-engineer a particular circuit for for a new part. then we get to spend months and $1000's on getting through fcc and ce compliance testing again.

FTK is what you want. Its what we used in college. (Computer Forensics Degree) This is what you need to use if you want an EXACT UNTOUCHED copy of an HDD. Anything else will leave a trace.

If its just to have a copy of an HDD to put on another HDD then Acronis is for you.

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Originally Posted by x88x

Sounds to me like you're more looking for a forensics tool, not a standard imaging tool. Maybe I'm misinterpreting your requirements, but all the talk about connecting drives separate to the machine, not altering the data on the disk at all, and the detailed record of when and what you're imaging at all screams 'forensics' at me. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with a tool like what you're looking for, but you might find something if you shift your search to cover computer forensics tools in addition to the normal imaging utilities.

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Good idea. I have one of my engineers looking at forensic tools now.

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Originally Posted by xr4man

i don't think it has to do with forensics.
he mentioned something about validation testing with the fda. it sounds to me like it is a just a product that needs to be exactly identical to the original so it doesn't have to go back through the testing phase. we have similar issues here when components go obsolete and we have to have to re-engineer a particular circuit for for a new part. then we get to spend months and $1000's on getting through fcc and ce compliance testing again.

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Correct that it is not tied to forensics, but many of the tools I use day to day, "touch" a drive in some way or another or do not have verification tools. And if you think the FCC is tough, the FDA is a complete nightmare. I was at another customer several months ago working on a project and out of no where, 4 Navy Officers show up at the front desk an initiate an FDA audit that lasts 2 months. Next thing we know they are asking for the original copies of the test data and work order information from us for several of the companies products.

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Originally Posted by Fuganater

FTK is what you want. Its what we used in college. (Computer Forensics Degree) This is what you need to use if you want an EXACT UNTOUCHED copy of an HDD. Anything else will leave a trace.

If its just to have a copy of an HDD to put on another HDD then Acronis is for you.

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Thanks for the tip. I will check out FTK.

oh yeah, to qualify my statement, i didn't mean you shouldn't use a forensics based software, just that that's not what the purpose was.

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Originally Posted by xr4man

oh yeah, to qualify my statement, i didn't mean you shouldn't use a forensics based software, just that that's not what the purpose was.

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No need for qualification. You are correct.

The thing that is really stewing me right now, is that we have a good relationship with Acronis and during the planning phase of this project, they said, "no problem, Advanced Backup and Recovery will do just what you need".
After struggling for weeks to get the software for testing, we ended up purchasing 3 licenses and after we were a week late delivering I find out that software has NO reporting capabilities.

This is why I am urgently seeking a solution.

Funny thing is, none of our other medical equipment customers have this strict requirement. We can create and burn images using clonezilla or Acronis with no issues.

Well, here's my two cents:

You could set up a computer with dual hot-swap bays, with a permanent HDD with Ubuntu installed.

GPartEd. Used it to clone a HDD before. Works 99.9% of the time.

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Originally Posted by AmEv

Works 99.9% of the time.

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And unfortunately, it's that 0.01% that'll turn around and bite you in the ass, especially when dealing with government regulations. ;)

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Originally Posted by AmEv

Well, here's my two cents:

You could set up a computer with dual hot-swap bays, with a permanent HDD with Ubuntu installed.

GPartEd. Used it to clone a HDD before. Works 99.9% of the time.

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Yes.. but does it fulfill the proper reporting and verification features?

Honestly, I don't know.

I've just used it to resize, move around, and copy partitions. Sure beats needing to reinstall Windows, all your games, etc.