NA Proprietary Software protection

[Let'sgoflying!]

I bought a (barely used) computer with proprietary (image manipulation) software installed.
How do I protect against the coming hdd crash?
Can the disk be mirrored, and the copy kept in the event of hd failure?
The manufacturer had no issue with the computer and software being sold and used by a new owner...I think they just don't want their software to become freeware.
This is the one that requires the use of a dongle.

 

[deonb]

1) Download clonezilla. http://clonezilla.org/
2) Prepare the clonezilla USB boot disk
3) Install a second drive that's the same size or bigger than the first
4) Boot from the clonezilla USB drive
5) Clone your drive (make SURE you're cloning the right way around!) using partition-to-partition clone
6) Work on your new drive from now on and keep the old one as a backup. That way if there is something you missed in clonezilla (e.g. if you really need to do a dd sector-by-sector copy instead of a partition-to-partition clone for it to work correctly), you'll have the original one still.