I've switched to the latest version of Mint and love this way better than Ubuntu. I have it all configured the way I want it now but something I've never done with Linux yet is create a disc image and restore from it. Out of all the ways to do this with Linux what is the one way you like the best? Ideally I want to keep this as simple as possible (like the way Windows 7 does it) but I'm open to hearing what everyone prefers. I've been reading up on this a lot the last couple of days and I see Clonezilla come up a lot but I'd love to see opinions here. What do you think is the easiest way to create/restore disc images with Mint?

Something like...

You could try Refracta and their wonderful Refractasnapshot tool.

http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta/

EDIT: http://refracta.freeforums.org/refra...tros-t111.html

This is my preferred method. Love me some dd.

I prefer fsarchiver. Since i have two Linux OSs it's a simple matter for me to restore one with fsarchiver on the other. If however you have only one on your disk i suggest a persistent live usb with fsarchiver installed on it.
The fsarchiver man page is not something that should daunt even a newbie, the entire list of commands/options is barely a page long
How to make a persistent live usb

I would however, qualify my suggestion with the following:
You will need a large enough usb, probably 16 GB at least.
I have yet to try it out with a live persistent usb.

Peek at the software manager for backup solutions. There are plenty of choices that you may wish to use.

In the best world, you'd use file by file such as Clonezilla/Redobackup would use. Other choice like tar, cpio, and gparted may also be useful.

There are so many choices when it comes to backup it is impossible to guess. A bit by bit solution like dd is OK but unless you compress the image off to remote storage the file can exceed your drive size.

I've used G4U a lot which is simply dd with compression. I use it networked to a storage location.

Why cloning for backup? Just rsync everything to a safe place. With LVM snapshots you can do this even on a running system.

I would use dd to create an image; however, I would back up using tar (plus gzip/bzip2) to restore at a later date.

If you ever want to restore to a different drive, you have to edit fstab file and change the uuid numbers which are unique to each drive, that is how linux know what home,root etc... are.