Story

"It is simply a front end to partclone". Ugg. I'll be skipping this one. Partclone / Clonezilla are both dumber than Ghost was 20 years ago, and require restoring to identically sized partitions. If you want to image your drive, the CloneZilla CD has that market pretty-well sewn-up, and I don't see why to bother with anything else. At the very least, I'd want more advanced features, like something based on FSArchiver, which is the more capable successor to partclone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FSArchiver

But that's still something you only want for cloning systems like in a lab. It's terribly inefficient for routine backups. You want something that'll do super-fast incremental backups, with deduplication to save disk space and allow numerous backups to coexist for restoring from long previous backups.

I personally found BackupPC unexpectedly impressive. Most all the benefits of rsync, on any Unix or Windows system, even those without rsync installed, wrapped-up in a slick user-interface. Interesting features like the ability to give non-admin users the rights to easily restore old versions of files automatically via the web UI, and a great scheduler with blackout time-blocks, which avoids the need to set exact times ala cron. Instead it is much more flexible to changes (eg. if one system suddenly has a lot more data to backup), and a dogged determination to backup all the systems you told it to, even if it runs out of time or something fails one night (or repeatedly).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackupPC

Should work great for small companies, or even families with several computers around. For my own more modest, uniform and boring home needs, I find rsync with --link-dest= (like "rsnapshot" does) to an occasionally-on external USB drive a slightly better fit for the time-being. Restoration just requires booting-up with systemrescuecd, recreating the partitions (format & mount to /mnt), running the rsync command in reverse, (rsync -a /dev /mnt/dev, chroot /mnt) then a couple attempts to remember just the right grub incantation... Most often just:

root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)

And done.