Mass storage and data management with Parted Magic
Disk Aid
© Lead Image © Amy Walters, 123RF.com
It's really annoying when a disk suddenly dies on you or a typo in a command deletes important data. The free Parted Magic Live distro offers help.
The explosion of hard disk capacities in recent years, coupled with the ever-improving multimedia capabilities of conventional computer systems, has led to massive growth in volumes of data in many households. But HD video, lossless audio files, and elaborate games force you pay more attention to backing up your data. Many naive users invest in expensive, commercial software, often accompanied by a yearly subscription fee, to create backups of their mass storage.
However, the Parted Magic Live distribution [1] gives you a permanent answer to backup problems. Parted Magic bills itself as "a complete hard disk management solution." The Live system comes with a collection of useful tools for partitioning, backup, disk cloning, data rescue, and more. Although the maintainer has recently asked for a contribution to help finance the GPL-licensed distribution, the price of just under US$ 5 is something anyone can afford.
Variants
Parted Magic offers several start options in the GRUB boot manager. If you use the operating system on an older machine with only 512MB of RAM, choose the Start option Live with default settings 32 (for 32-bit machines) or Live with default settings 64 (for 64-bit PCs).
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