A nice partition Magic Alternative...

So you've got a drive that's dying and you want to copy it's contents over to a new drive. Normally people would use Norton Ghost to do the job and I must say Ghost does a fantastic job at it as I've used the product many times in an industrial setting. However today I just needed to recover some data from a dying drive before the drive failed and put it on a larger one. I didn't have a copy of Ghost anywhere in my disks, not sure where my disk went so onto the google search engine I went. Very quickly I found what I was looking for. A free and I must say very flexible product called Clonezilla. In my situation i was able to use it to clone my friends drive to a remote SSH location...

Huh? What do you mean by remote location?

Well it means that Clonezilla created an image file for me but not on the machine I'm working with... It grabs the data and stores it over the network on another machine. In my case it is the 500GB sata raid drive in my server. This means that I will retain the state that the machine is in so if the drive fails I can simply re image it from that ssh location. Theoretically this would even work from a far off remote location but on the local network it would be MUCH MUCH faster. I have a gigabit connection so things run smooth as can be and it doesn't affect my usual web traffic.

I recommend you use Clonezilla if you need a free alternative to commercial cloning software.

Cheers!~