Imaging software

I'm looking at starting to do some backups by imaging the entire drive with software like Acronis True Image. Is there an open source alternative?

I have looked at Clonezilla primarily. I'm just having a hard time finding multiple reviews that point towards any particular piece of software. It seems like there are a lot of choices, but there don't seem to be many people saying "these are the three main contenders in this category". I'd appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

btw, I doubt it really matters much for this discussion, but my primary operating system is Windows XP even though I have a triple boot with Vista and Ubuntu (I'm a perpetual Linux noob) so I need to be able to use whatever software I come up with for all three. Like I said, I don't think it will be a problem with this type of software, but I figured full disclosure may be helpful.

 

bump....

I'm interested in clonezilla myself, curious in hearing from anyone that has used it.

 

Personally, I just use dd. Pipe it through gzip or bzip2 if you want a compressed image If the system can be taken offline, you could boot it off of a CD/USB and use tar to create an image of the boot disk's filesystem. That was the original point of tar, actually.

 

Acronis is the best, why do you need open source?

 

I like the road less traveled. Not to mention it's cheaper...

Thanks for the suggestions and the link. I'll read up on both options.