I've had great experiences with Ghost. You can use a Linux boot CD to backup a partition, at no cost, but it's significantly more work-intensive and you may want to keep up with a boot media that'll let you rewrite your MBR just in case. Again, please don't try this on your real data unless you've done it with drives about which you do not care.
What got me started was this link on
cpqlinux.com
What follows below is basically totally from them, but changed to match what I did.
I'm not recommending you do this -- but what I did was:
0. I had a single internal IDE hard drive, and an external USB disk drive.
1. Boot from a Knoppix CD.
2. Use "fdisk -l /dev/hda" to verify I can see my partition map on the first IDE device.
3. Use "mkdir -p /mnt/usbdrive ; mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdrive" to mount my USB drive.
4. Build the partition backup with "dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.partition1.img"
5. Build the MBR backup with "dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 of=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.mbr"
Restoring would just replace steps 4 and 5 with
4. dd if=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.partition1.img of=/dev/hda1
5. dd if=/mnt/usbdrive/mybackup.mbr of=/dev/hda
Restoring is contingent on you having the exact same partition layout on the drive, though. If you change your partition geometry then this will almost certainly not work. I used this for a little while, then bought Ghost. Ghost has some other features that are nice, like the ability to browse the old drive snapshots (much easier if they're not broken onto CDs), which really made it worth it for me. The first time I was able to browse out the one file I'd deleted from my backup image withouth blowing away the whole system, Ghost paid for itself
🙂
Again, caution and careful, YMMV. Test before relying on it, please.
