have you used fsarchiver ? i heard bad things about partimage that it doesn't recognize the files it creates and you have to rename them all to .gz or i don't know what ...

fsarchiver seems promising and i made a few backups of ntfs partition using it ... so , have you used it ? and if so , what do you think about it?

is it safe to use? partimage would be better?

Partimage must be ok because I use clonezilla and it refers to partimage as I'm using it.
Clonezilla-live works though, I backed up a 40gig drive, it took up only 11 gigs.
Of course being my first time I made a backup image(11Gig) and stored on Debian machine.
Then I cloned it to a 40gig drive for safe keeping on debian machine.
Then I almost felt comfortable enough to play with drive, but didn't.
I cloned the 40gig clone palced it in laptop and worked on it, got it going .
I restored an image to original drive it worked,so I'm happy with CZ.

fsarchiver has been fine anytime I've used it. Several times it was my only backup when I needed to trash and rebuild a machine.
I like it because it verifies the data.
Caveat - I only use it on Linux (native) filesystems.

for me it failed . everytime i used it gave me errors. with partimage i didn't backup and restore yet .. will see .. i currently have on my usb flash drive the partimage backup , but since i can't put it on different sized file systems , i guess i'll change it with a fsarchiver backup . just to be sure ... my partition / is only 10GB but i use like less than 4GB from it .. so perhaps when i will install windows 7(yes , i plan on doing that...) will restore from that.

does it also compress iso images as well ? ...