I have two suggestions for you. Free: do a google search for systemrescuecd, download and burn the iso file. You now have a bootable CD containing among other things partimage and qt_parted. Partimage will create an image of any partition and seems to work fairly well. Only problem is that for restoring you must first create the partition which must be the same size or larger than the partition you want to restore. Which is where qt_parted comes in. Not free but not too expensive is Image for Linux which can be found at the following url http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/imagel.html I have not tried this one. Actually there's a third one Storix (free for individuals as I recall). I found this one some complicated and requiring a free drive to store backups. Since I didn't have a free drive when I tried it I never really got it working. And finally there is rsync or grsync which is a slightly more user friendly front end to rsync which I'm now using to backup to an external hard drive. You'd probably need a copy of the bootable CD Knoppix in order to do a restore. Allan