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Backups are important, drives fail. Regular users should, at least, be backing up documents, photos etc. but if you are a little more techie you may want to back up your entire drive or partition. I find it useful to image (create a full backup) of my system drive so if it gets infected, or the drive fails, I can get back to a working system with the basics installed very quickly.

I have used various programs for doing this over the years, recently I have been using DriveXML from www.runtime.org but have just found Todo Backup from EaseUs, there is a direct link at www.todo-backup.com I already use, and like, EaseUS's Partition Manager software.

I have found both DriveXML and Todo backup excellent at doing backups but here's why I find the latter best fits my needs:

DriveXML is quicker and easier to use but Todo backup has more features.

Todo backup has a more polished user interface.

You can backup an entire drive in one process rather than one partition at a time with Todo.

Todo has a bootcd creation tool built in which creates a linux boot cd with Todo backup for restoring a drive (this is less complicated than having to use BartPE with a plugin).

DriveXML will only split files to fit on CD's, Todo backup has many other options.

Both programs can mount the backup file(s) so you can recover individual files.

And here's some speed/compression tests I did on a P3 1ghz, 512mb, 80gb system with a base install of windows XP.  The C drive had 3.80gb and all backups were done to the D partition.

DriveXML with no compression turned on took 6 minutes and created a backup in 3.82gb

Todo backup with no compression took 3.5 minutes and created a backup in 2.68 gb

Todo backup with normal compression took 9 minutes and created a backup in 1.55gb

These tests are hardly comprehensive but give a general idea of the performance of the 2 programs.

So it looks like I'll be using Todo backup from now on. And one more thing, Todo backup is free for home and commercial use, DriveXML is only free for home use.