Backing up partitions and hard disks sounds like work -- until you've tried Clonezilla. With Clonezilla you can clone and duplicate partitions of various formats and disks of various sizes locally or over the network. Even more impressive is the fact that you can do all this without typing complicated commands. And since Clonezilla is available as part of the GParted-Clonezilla live CD, you don't even have to install it.