I've tried almost everything. G4L (ghost 4 linux), Norton Ghost, Clonezilla, CorneliOS, Terabyte, Acronis (can be found on some hiren's boot disks), Macrium, Bareos, as well as the built in stuff (which never worked ever, incl making a vhd .wim image which for all intents was worthless tbh). G4L and Bareos are for the advanced pc users for sure, which rules me out. I like it to be as simple as is possible. Recently I used Redobackup:
http://redobackup.org/. It's a boot disk that 'seems', I say seems 'cause I've not used it to restore yet, to work very well. Takes a little long to make a backup compared to acronis but considering how many times I've had problems with both linux and windows (not to mention acronis as well) and needing to reinstall, backing up is almost a #1 priority when it comes to computers anymore.
Update: Since I just switched back, again, to windows after having a linux distro crash; I used redo with good results.
I have 17+gb's of data on my 320gb c drive unpartitioned. It took redo like an hour an a half (at 200mb/min bit copying) to back it up, and there were approximately 12-15 sector error (disk may be damaged) messages I had to OK. Between the abysmally slow copying and the "your disk may be damaged-OK" bs, I dern near started looking for another solution. There was even an error message right at the very very end (99.99% done) lol. I thought, why not divide the disk in half and put ext4 at the beginning and ntfs at the end and restore it that way. Possibly I could avoid the read errors next time, idk.
Even though it says to pick the parts you want to backup, apparently it must be partitioned that way to begin with when you do back it up. It ignored my scheme and I am now back to a non-partitioned disk, albeit a perfectly functioning one. Took 26 min to restore.
I may back it up with acronis and THEN use the dual partitioning scheme, and then use redo and see if it recognizes sda2 for recovery. It should. BTW, redo is a mini ubuntu; full desktop, gparted, browser, file manager, etc; but not much else. Though it does have an option to create a bootable usb redo image from the live cd one. It however would not allow me to mount my ntfs disks to say transfer files using the file mgr. Whatever it's free and it works. I need a newer smaller os disc. 320gb is way too much, especially with stupid read errors. It also would not change the resolution even though it gave me the gui to do so. My monitor likes 1920x1200 and I like 1280x1024. nbd
One last thing. The backup folder has 10.7gb's & was automatically split at 2gb marks (*.000, *.001, etc). That way you can back up to a fat formatted flash if you have one to spare.
