What if you want to clone your entire operating system and data so you can move it to a larger hard drive, or create a backup for a bare-metal restore? Check out the wonderful , which has the coolest name and mighty cloning superpowers. There are two editions: Clonezilla Live and Clonezilla SE. Clonezilla Live is for bare metal backup and recovery of individual machines, and it runs from a bootable USB stick or CD/DVD. Clonezilla SE clones multiple PCs simultaneously, and very quickly over your network.

Clonezilla operates at the block level on x86 and x86-64 platforms, so it copies any operating system and filesystem.

is one of the most popular cross-platform encryption applications, and for good reason-- it's easy to use and very strong. TrueCrypt runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It encrypts partitions, entire storage devices, and creates hidden volumes. First you create an encrypted volume, and then files are automatically encrypted and decrypted on the fly as you use them. You only need to enter your password when you first mount a volume.

You can share encrypted volumes over a network, and TrueCrypt also has a portable mode where you can run it from removable media, without installing it on the host system.