Fortysomething Geek

Here is another geek short review of another handy gadgets for those who build their own computers.

The Syba 5.25" Dual Bay mobile rack for both 2.5" (ssd/laptop) and 3.5" drives plus USB 3.0 headers. It sells for around 30ドル-40 which tends to be a bit more expensive compared to 20ドル single bay units. Unlike the 20ドル single bay units, you get USB front ports and a second bay which justifies the price differential.

My computer case has 5 front 5.25" drive bays unused so I try to fill them with useful stuff. This is very handy. I've installed many dockable drive bay enclosures but this is the first one to neatly provide two drives along with USB. Hence my recommendation.

As you can see from the press shots, you can pack quite a bit. The USB 3.0 front connectors connect directly to an available 19/20 pin USB 3.0 connector on your motherboard. The bay requires only one SATA power connector (it also comes with a MOLEX adapter) to power both drives.

You will also need two available free SATA ports.

The nice thing I like about it is the power switch that you can turn off and leave the drives off. You simply flip the switch to make the drives available when you need them.

Today, I won an ebay bid for a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad mini dock 3 and it brought back some memories. I am thinking about the convenience of docking at work and having my stuff all ready to go. No hassles of cables and clutter.

Unfortunately, modern day docking stations are simply port-replicators for convenience. In the past, they are way much more.

So I am getting a new computer this week. As usual, I follow a strict methodology of preparation for new equipment.

Today's post will be about CloneZilla (http://clonezilla.org/).
In short, CloneZilla is a free Linux based disaster recovery imaging system like Norton Ghost.



Whenever I get a new computer running Windows or Linux, I run clonezilla. Before even booting it, I always clone the drive into a disk image. The drive may be 750GB but the OS install and apps may only take up 20GB. Using clonezilla, I save a factory fresh, ready-to-restore image to a portable drive or to a NAS server (via SFTP). In the event I want to sell an older computer, I can restore the drive to its factory original state.

After I install my applications and set up my system, I do another clone image in case of disaster, viruses, or anything unexpected.

Clonezilla can be installed on to a bootable USB stick or CD.

Usage is very straightforward. You pick a drive or partition you want to clone. You can clone to another drive or as image files. The image files can be an external drive or to a remote server volume. The image files are chunked into small pieces so they can fit on file-systems like FAT32.

Restoring is the opposite process. It interface is old school command-line menu. There is nothing to click and it isn't pretty but it works.

Instead of a barebone Clonezilla install, I suggest PartedMagic. PartedMagic is a complete bootable Linux distro with a bunch of tools which include Clonezilla, Gparted (for redoing partitions), Trucerypt, TestDisk (for recovering files off a crashed hard drive), and a bunch of other recovery applications.

In addition to physical machines, I routinely use CloneZilla along with Gpart to upsize or enlarge Virtual Machine images. For example, if I have a 8GB VM that I want to grow to 20GB, I use Clonezilla to clone and gpart to increase the partition size. Hence, I suggest using a distro like PartedMagic.

More info on PartedMagic can be found here: http://partedmagic.com/doku.php

On the mac, there is always Carbon Cloner. Macs have the beauty using of Target Disk Mode which is where a mac can be booted into a disk drive mode that another mac can mount and use. Hence, I never had to use anything like Clonezilla for imaging on a macintosh.