Partition/Disk imaging with CloneZilla

    CloneZilla it's a free and open source software for partition imaging and disk cloning. Some features I liked:

1. It supports ext4 partitions
2. It's possible to do all the steps from command line (do imaging/restoring in unattended mode)
3. The image file can be located on the local disk, on external USB drive, on an ssh server, samba server or NFS server

The complete list of features and limitations on the site.

I used CloneZilla Live, a bootable Linux based on Debian, on an USB stick, using Method A. Till now I restored one Ubuntu ext4 partition and one NTFS with Windows. 

Tips (from faqs):

• Restore *.ntfs-img.* images into a partition manually:
  If the image is /home/partimag/YOURIMAGE/hda1.ntfs-img.aa, hda1.ntfs-img.ab..., and you want to restore the image to /dev/sda2.
  Before you do it, make sure the partition size of /dev/hda2 is equal to or larger than the original partition size of hda1 image.
  Then
  file /home/partimag/YOURIMAGE/hda1.ntfs-img.aa
  (to see it's gzip, bzip or lzop image). For gzip, then you can run
  cat /home/partimag/YOURIMAGE/hda1.ntfs-img.* | gzip -d -c | ntfsclone --restore-image -o /dev/hda2 -
  
• Restore an image of a partition to different partition:
  
  1. Make sure the destination partition is larger than the original one.
  2. Rename all the files /home/partimag/my-image-new/sda4* as /home/partimag/my-image-new/sda2* (the original was sda4, now it's sda2)
  3. Modify the content of /home/partimage/my-image-new/parts, replace sda4 with sda2.

ToDO:

• Test the unattended automated mode.