If one of your new year’s resolutions was to make sure you’ve got solid system backups (and why wouldn’t it be?), then you’ve got to check out January’s Project of the Month (POTM). Clonezilla is a slick partition or disk clone tool that saves and restores used blocks on a hard drive. It’s perfect for sysadmins who need a way to perform bare metal recovery on one or even forty drives.

Getting started with Clonezilla is dead simple. “Clonezilla live comes with a GNU/Linux distribution for the machine you want to do the bare metal recovery on. It works on X86/X86-64 PCs, Intel-based Macs. If you want to use Clonezilla live, just download the Clonezilla live ISO image and burn it onto a CD. Alternatively, you can download the Clonezilla live zip file, extract all the files to a USB flash drive, and make it bootable. Then you can boot the machine you want to image or clone with the CD or USB flash drive. Just follow the menu instructions and you should be able to do this easily,” says Project Lead Steven Shiau.

To learn more about January’s Project of the Month, be sure to check out Clonezilla’s very own POTM page. Keep an eye out for Shiau’s concise but sage wisdom about his advice to a project that’s just starting out.

Thorvald Natvig was tired of listening to all kinds of background noise over his headset while he was gaming online with his friends, so he decided to build his own VoIP solution instead. Mumble is way more than a glorified walkie-talkie setup, it’s much cooler than that.

In Natvig’s own words, “Mumble also has an in-game overlay; this works in full screen games, and shows you a graphical representation of who is in the same channel (virtual room) as you, and who is talking right now. We also have positional audio for supported games; the voice of your friends will sound like it comes from the same direction their in-game avatar is.”

Neat, yes? That’s one of the reasons Mumble is November’s Project of the Month. To learn more about the team behind Mumble, and about the project itself, check out its special page.

Natvig says one of the reasons he chose SourceForge.net to host the project is because we’re “a recognized name, and we’re leeching on your fame.” That’s OK, Thorvald, leech all you want!

If you’re moving to a new home or caught the redecorating bug from watching home improvement shows on television, then you’re going to love October’s Project of the Month. Sweet Home 3D is a cool Java-based application you can use to draw the rooms of a building and rearrange its contents, furniture, walls, flooring, and so on.

View redecorated rooms from above or as a virtual visitor, then export completed plans viaPDF, SVG, or OBJ formats. Sweet Home 3D works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Project Lead Emmanuel Puybaret says he got the idea while doing research for a book about Java/Swing programming. “[I] was looking for a cool study case that would show how to use Swing in an open source project. I thought first about a RSS/Atom reader, but soon realized there was already a lot of software in that category and the book wouldn’t be that original. Then I unburied this old fun idea I had about programming an interior design software. I divided the basic features into eighteen scenarios and explained the first 10 in the book, including how to host it on SourceForge.net. Once the book was published, I went on and developed the other scenarios before releasing the version 1.0 in mid-2007.”

Puybaret released Sweet Home 3D version 2.1 just this week, so be sure to head over to its Project of the Month page and read about all the things this neat application can do.

All the projects hosted at SourceForge are special and important, but it’s hard to deny the potential impact the September’s Project of the Month might have long-term. Medical is an electronic medical record and information system designed to help developing countries manage the healthcare needs of its population.

Medical’s project team was recently called on to implement a pilot program involving nine-thousand patients in Northern Argentina. Its developers are slated to present the program and its data at various health conferences worldwide this year. According to project lead Luis Falcon, the pilot program is providing some “very interesting epidemiological data”

The project’s key developers are spread across the globe, and rely on SourceForge’s collaboration tools to make it all work. They’ve got big plans for its future development and are looking for volunteers to pitch in with everything from documentation to testing. To learn more about Medical and the team behind this important healthcare information system, check out September’s Project of the Month page.

What did you want for your fourth birthday? A remote controlled car? A lightsaber? A pony? Well, break out the cake and candles, because the eyeOS project rings in its fourth birthday as SourceForge’s August Project of the Month. eyeOS is a Web-based operating system designed for the cloud that’s equally great for personal use or team collaboration.

The Barcelona-based team worked hard over the past four years to get its first release out the door while supporting themselves by building Web sites, and now they’re looking ahead to eyeOS version 2.0, due out later this year. That’s not all the project has going on, however. “We founded 15-person company in Barcelona to offer eyeOS-based services mainly to education, public administrations, and ISPs. We should work eight hours per day, but it’s usually more than that,” says project lead Pau Garcia-Mila.

Head over to the Project of the Month page to learn more about eyeOS, then set up a free account on the project’s public server and try it out for yourself.

Rock Band is cool but a lot of us cut our gaming teeth on old school video games like Mech Warrior and the original Sim City. I’m sure I’m not the only one with floppies (remember those?) of my favorite games from the 80s and early 90s, am I? The problem is, a lot of these nostalgic games need DOS to run.

This month’s Project of the Month winner is DOSBox, a free and open source DOS-emulator that lets you run classic games on any platform. To learn more about it, read an interview with the team behind DOSBox, and be sure to check out the advice they give to projects that are just starting out.

You definitely need to check out dotProject, April’s Project of the Month. It’s a great information gathering and progress reporting tool designed for project managers to use in their day-to-day work.

DotProject has been around since 2001, so the team has a lot of experience under its belt. They say one of the best things a new project team can do when starting out is to “get a clear idea of what your project is designed to do and make sure you stick to that. Do one thing and do it well. ”

A wide variety of businesses deploy dotProject, from an Australian winery to an aircraft manufacturer. Apparently, there’s even a defense contractor using dotProject but they won’t say why (mystery!). How cool is that?

Guitar Hero has nothing on our March Project of the Month, Frets On Fire. It’s an awesomely cool game that tests how well you can play the guitar by using the keyboard, joystick, or guitar controller. Download one of the tons of songs created by the community or make your own with the built-in editor.

Project Leader Sami Kyöstilä says he’s been “overwhelmed by the community’s response to Frets On Fire, “These days you can find thousands of community-made add-on song tabulatures on the Internet, along with several high-quality game modifications that provide new graphics, instruments and other amazing features. Several people have also built their own custom guitar controllers for the game. One example I found particularly inspiring was a University project in which a special version of the game along with custom controllers was created for the blind.”

Read all about Frets On Fire on its Project of the Month page, then download it and check it out for yourself. How fast are your fingers?

Can it really be 2009 already? Our first Project of the Month winner for the year is the WYSIWYG JavaScript open source editor, TinyMCE.

If the name isn’t familiar, the interface surely is. Wordpress has been shipping TinyMCE as its editor of choice since the release of Wordpress 2.0, and it’s also the default editor for the popular content management system, Joomla.

Project leads Johan “Spocke” Sˆrlin and Joakim Lindkvist say they’re really proud of TinyMCE because of its clean, tight code and because it holds its own against similar (and costly) commercial solutions.

Have a look at this month’s Project of the Month page to read all about TinyMCE and its goals for the future.

What’s better than totally legal peer-to-peer file sharing? Not much, right? This month’s Project of the Month, Shareaza, is a cool way to way to get your hands on more than 15 million songs and videos.

Shareaza’s developers say there’s lots of things that make this project unique. “It is probably the only app that supports completely all features of the G2 network, it allows advanced control of downloads and searches and all aspects of the application, it can search by various hashes: sha1, tiger, ed2k, md5, btih (this also allows for revival of dead torrents by search torrent sources using btih over G2 and also allow to download from other networks the same file).”

There’s more, too, and you can read all about it right here.