And for those without a bios with a built in backup function. or those who it may interest or help..
this is the fastest free way I have found to backup and restore ntfs. (i don't have a bios with built in backup as ninaholic37 does)
Live boot any modern linux distro thy have ntfs tools included. and use the $ntfsclone command. After installing everything i use with pagefiles disabled my OS partition is just under 3gigs and litterally takes less than 60seconds(i never timed it but i know its fast) to restore with ntfsclone.. thats on a slow 5400rpm netbook hdd, restoring from same HDD different partition.. probably takes less than 10seconds from an external 7200 or higher modern HD. note- i dont compress the image, but ntfsclones image format only takes up the same amount of Used space thats on the OS.
http://www.sysresccd.org/SystemRescueCd_Homepage
http://linux.die.net/man/8/ntfsclone
the commands i used. for any interestd linux noobs. the commands may need interpretation for your system but i know examples help a lot, or i know they would of helped me when i was first trying to figure out linux lol.
#list partitions
$ fdisk -l
#list mount points already in use
$ df -h
#mount linux partition
$ mkdir /mnt/example
$ mount /dev/sda# /mnt/example
#mounting ntfs partitions
$ ntfs-3g /dev/sda# /mnt/example
#backup ntfs hdd1 partition1 to ntfs hdd2 partition3
$ mkdir /mnt/example
$ ntfs-3g /dev/sdb3 /mnt/example
$ mkdir /mnt/example/directory
$ ntfsclone -s -o /mnt/example/directory/name_example.img /dev/sda1
#restore from name_example.img
$ mkdir /mnt/example
$ ntfs-3g /dev/sdb3 /mnt/example
$ ntfsclone -r --overwrite /dev/sda1 /mnt/example/directory/name_example.img