What software can be used to create a restorable drive image?

Clonezilla is fairly popular though I've never used it. I would imagine you should be able to install it to its own partition and hack it into grub so it's there as a boot option (which I assume is what you're going for).

But most people just boot to it on CD or USB.

A simple solution is to use the dd command.

To back up a drive partition (eg. /dev/sda1), run this command:

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=~/sda1_backup

and to restore:

sudo dd if=~/sda1_backup of=/dev/sda1

For more information on the dd command, see man dd.

To reduce the space used by the backup images, you could use gzip, bzip2 etc. to compress the images. If you do this, you will need to decompress the images before restoring.

Personally I use these:

• clonezilla
• g4l
• systemrescuecd