Best Boot Drive Imaging Software

Hey guys, would like a general consensus on what you think is the best to use to backup a boot drive to an external so that if anything goes wrong on the internal boot, I can just pop a new drive in there and image/recover it back over easily, no frills, high reliability... and of course free is always good as long as it works for this one purpose:

Acronis True Image
Norton Ghost
Clonezilla (free/open source)
G4L (free/open source)
BackupPC (free/open source)
Bacula (free/open source)
(Any Linux app, Ghost, ddrescue, etc....)

(If applicable, Windows XP Pro and will have many programs installed, and possibly large files, i.e., HD video files, going from a 1TB internal to a 1TB external)

I'm a fan of clonezilla. I just had to burn my 3rd copy of it in 3 months last night. The project seems pretty active, and release new updates pretty often. So far it detected all the RAID arrays I've used, without having to manually select a driver. Acronis is pretty good to, but never used it much for image backups. I hate everything Norton, and I haven't used anything else you listed.

Only problem with clonezilla is you gotta boot into its Linux kernel to do any imaging. If you're in a high availability environment where servers can never go down, you might want to look elsewhere.

BackupPC and Bacula can't really do image restores for Windows PCs. At least last time I checked all they could do was backup and restore files, if you lost a HDD you would have to install Windows and then restore your files.

I've used Acronis and Ghost and prefered Acronis. Although I haven't tried the newer versions of Ghost, it has been a few years since I used it. I haven't used any of the others.

+1 for acronis simple and fast, used to use i think ghost 9 but it occasionally gave errors when restoring, granted this was when it was just released and "hot imaging" was coming about.

I've got Norton Ghost 10.0, and I haven't had any problems. But I haven't had to restore either. The backups were all direct to an external drive, using the so called "hot imaging"

I have read a lot about this..and people that know way more about HDDs believe that hot imaging is not a viable solution. These people use an older version of Ghost that is DOS based.

I almost got Acronis as well..