A clone may refer to any of the following:

  1. In computer manufacturing (and sometimes software development), a clone is a product which closely resembles another, successful product. For example, “IBM PC compatible” computers were known as “IBM clones” or “PC clones”. They were designed to look like IBM PCs, run the same software, and use the same expansion cards. One of the first IBM clones was the Compaq Portable, released in 1982.

  2. A disk clone is a byte-for-byte copy of entire disk, or disk partition. The clone may be written directly to another partition, or an image file which can be stored in the filesystem. Image files may be encrypted to ensure privacy, or compressed to conserve disk space.

Methods of disk cloning

  • On Windows, disk cloning software includes the freeware software AOMEI Backupper, and the commercial software Symantec Ghost Suite.
  • On macOS X, popular disk cloning titles include Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper.
  • On Linux, clonezilla provides a command-line and GUI-based disk cloning solution.
  • BSD, Linux, and macOS X also provide the low-level terminal command dd, which writes raw data directly to disk.

  1. In Git, a clone is a copy of an existing local or remote repository.

  2. A clone is a term to describe a copy.

Chat terms, Closed Architecture, Hardware terms, IBM compatible, PostScript clone