Clonezilla is Linux text based and I use it to Ghost my laptop drive, so in the event of failure I have a swappable backup.

Its also good for upgrading hard drives. When I brought my last laptop it was only 60gb but had the Original Thinkpad restore partition and my own software, so I used clonezilla to clone the hard disk to a brand new 500gb drive, and then used GPARTED to increase the partition size. Both invaluable pieces of software.