Need advice HELP with hard drive clone options

[scampbell70]

I am a graduate student and my life is on my laptop. I have a 500gig hard drive in it and I have 450 gigs partitioned as a windows 7 drive and 50 gigs partitioned with Ubuntu on it. I recently had a major malfunction occur which forced me to format and reinstall my entire drive. It took me days to repair it and I still ended up losing some things I cannot replace. SO my question is this how can I make a clone of my entire drive so that in the event that something like this happens again I can use the image file to restore both my Windows and Ubuntu partitions easily. I am wondering if anyone knows if programs like ghost, or true image will do something like this, and is there anything free I can use to do this since I am a broke student.

Thank you in advance for any help the community is able to provide me with.

[sammiev]

I use clonezilla just for that and it works great. Check out the addie and give it a try. GL

[scampbell70]

That worked thank you very much

[sammiev]

That worked thank you very much

Glad I was able to help. GL