Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Virtual CloneDrive VS RANCID

Compare Virtual CloneDrive VS RANCID and see what are their differences

Virtual CloneDrive logo Virtual CloneDrive

Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive, although it only exists virtually.

RANCID logo RANCID

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.
  • Virtual CloneDrive Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-29
  • RANCID Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-08

Virtual CloneDrive videos

Virtual CloneDrive Review

More videos:

  • Review - What is Virtual CloneDrive

RANCID videos

Puppet Perspectives - Rancid "Troublemaker" Album Review (feat. Dan)

More videos:

  • Review - Rancid Life Won't Wait Album Review
  • Review - Review: Rancid “Trouble Maker”

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Virtual CloneDrive and RANCID)
CD Image Creator
100 100%
0% 0
Network Automation
0 0%
100% 100
DVD Image Creator
100 100%
0% 0
Configuration Auditing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Virtual CloneDrive and RANCID. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, RANCID seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 9 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Virtual CloneDrive mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Virtual CloneDrive yet. Tracking of Virtual CloneDrive recommendations started around Mar 2021.

RANCID mentions (9)

  • Cisco switch backup/restore?
    A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Version control for network configs
    Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Management Software for Cisco Devices?
    RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • What all are you doing with Ansible?
    If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Starting with python at 30
    Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Virtual CloneDrive and RANCID, you can also consider the following products

DAEMON Tools - The most personal application for disc imaging yet.

Unimus - Unimus is a Network Automation and Configuration management (NCM) solution designed for fast deployment network-wide and ease of use. Unimus does not require learning any abstraction or templating languages, and does not require any coding skills.

WinCDEmu - WinCDEmu is an open-source CD/DVD/BD emulator.

Oxidized - configuration backup software (IOS, JunOS) - silly attempt at rancid

UltraISO - CD image files are easily created with UltraISO.

GenieACS - A fast and lightweight TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)