Among the many tools out there for cloning drives and performing full-system backups, one came to my attention for being both free (and open source) and powerful: Clonezilla, a product of the Free ...

Clonezilla is a bootable CDROM designed for partition backup and restoration. Unlike SystemRescueCD, Clonezilla Live doesn't contain an array of utilities, rather, it is a single, focused tool.

Clonezilla performs two basic kinds of disk-copying operations: disk-to-disk and disk-to-file. Disk-to-disk is exactly what it sounds like — a way to directly copy the contents of one disk or ...