LoL believe it or not,I use Ubuntu 9.04 for the same thing lol.
I never create a single image of my HDD because if that file somehow get's damaged,you are fuc!!ed up lol.I rather copy my entire HDD contents in one empty folder on the external HDD using Ubuntu 9.04 and whenever I need to restore my system back in the perfect condition,(in that case if I got virus,many system errors or if there is no way to make it alive anymore),I just delete everything from the HDD in my computer and copy ALL the contents from my external HDD back to my computer's HDD using Ubuntu 9.04.
This procedure is more complicated then using image programs which do that for you,but who cares lol.It always works,100% risk free and the most important thing...IT'S FREE
Also on this way you can easily copy EVERYTHING from one computer into another computer and make everything work perfectly without losing your time on installing OS,programs,games and so on blablabla...
And the good thing is that this procedure works perfectly on any computers lol so you can copy EVERYTHING from one computer into any computers or laptops you have no matter how many of them you have even if you have them 100 lol and they will work and have the EXACT data like on your computer from which you were copying the data from.
The ONLY thing you will have to install on your new computer(s) are the drivers,but that's logical since every hardware is different and needs it's own drivers to work properly.But that should not be a problem since the driver installation really doesn't take a long time lol.
So my point is...it's free and works perfectly lol
I did use the image programs many times in my life,and they always worked perfectly,BUT one day I made the image of my entire C: drive on my external HDD as I already did many times and at the end it said that image was successfuly created on my external HDD which is what I expected as usual.So I formatted my HDD in my laptop and went back to put the image on my laptop back as I did many times before and guess what.After the image was "successfuly" copied on my laptop,I turned on my laptop and got the following error:
"NTLDR is missing.Press any key to restart your computer"
Then I tryed to copy the image AGAIN in the case if something went wrong,but after the image was again "successfuly" copied from my external HDD into my laptop's HDD,I got the same error again and the funny thing is that the NTLDR file WAS there lol.So I thought that the file is damaged so I replaced it using my Windows OS disk,but still O got the same error on every boot up.
The cause of the problem?
---> Something went wrong when the program was creating the image file of my C: drive.Why? There is no answer to that.It always worked perfectly,but THIS time something bad happened EVEN if the Image program reported that everything finished successfuly.
So my point is...FUC!!K that by putting ALL the files and folders into one single image file lol and also the hell with the image programs because sooner or later you will get screwed lol.And once that happens,there is nothing you can do about it.
Ubuntu is free,the best and even of something goes wrong,you will maybe lose one single DLL or EXE or TXT or whatever file type instead of ALL the data which in my case is 500 GB lol!
And in those 500 GB I have:
-entire operating system installed
-all the drivers installed
-all the programs installed
-all the games installed
-all the adjusted settings in the operating system,drivers,programs and games
-pictures
-musics
-movies
-and ALL other data...
In short...every single BIT lol
