clone the compactflash irc5

Hello good, I have acquired an irb 260 irc5 m2004 with RW 5.11 for self-training. My question is since I am going to be doing a lot of programming tests, I want to make sure I have a copy of the operating system, especially the boot partition. I want to clone the original compactflash and use the clones for normal use and save the original. I have read that to clone the compactflash you have to do it through linux. Does anyone know how?