As many of you probably know, the ultimate way to backup your hard drive is by creating an image of it. With an image, you can restore the exact state of your system to that at the time the image was created.

While there are several commercial packages to do this, a free alternative you might want to give a try is DriveImage XML. This program features many of the features you would see in the commercial products, including (from their web page):

• Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
• Browse these images, view and extract files
• Restore these images to the same or a different drive
• Copy directly from drive to drive
• Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler

If all you need to do is manipulate hard drive images, this may be a good fit for you.