Kleo Bare Metal Backup for Servers is a free file system cloning program created by Carroll-Net Inc. Kleo creates an all-inclusive backup of the operating system, device drivers and applications. Kleo is bundled with a LiveCD which includes tools for server recovery.

Operation

Kleo is a graphical wizard file system cloning system.^[1] It is designed as a disaster-recovery tool, producing complete file system images.^[2] In the event a server experiences a hard drive failure, the LiveCD can be booted, and the previous backup image can be used to recover the server to the point in time of the last backup.^[3]

Kleo backups are file system aware backups.^[4] Unused blocks and empty space are not included which reduces the size of the backup image. The backup images are also passed through gzip to further compress their size. But even with compression, backup images can be quite large. For this reason, they are not suitable replacements for daily backups and are typically only done whenever significant changes are made to a server's application set or prior to applying service patches and hotfixes.^[5]

Supported storage media

• Hard drive
• USB/Firewire drive
• CIFS Windows network share
• SSH server
• NFS server

Supported file systems

Known limitations

• Kleo does NOT support Ext4 which is the default on new Ubuntu installations
• The destination partition must be the same or larger than the source partition (limitation of the underlying partimage tool)

File format

The file format written is a gzipped partimage file. The file extension is .KB2 The backup image is broken into 2 GB chunks to make it possible to store the backups on DVD.