When clients present machines (non booting or acting strangely) the first thing I do is look to create a backup. Armed with an external caddy of the appropriate type and Active Disk Image software available from here – I can quickly create an image of the system before starting to work on the machine having problems. The software is reasonable priced and will probably pay for itself after the first recovery you do. The features are extensive – take a look here at the versions as well but the one feature I like above all others is the ability to restore to a different sized disk. The time and effort that this saves when someone just wants to replace the disk in a laptop with a newer much higher capacity without any risk to their configuration or data makes it a simple procedure.
The main uses for the app for me would be
Data Revovery
Data transfer
Cloning – say making 20 copies of the same config to 20 disks – great time saver.
Scheduled imaging of machines