For what you want to do, I'd recommend
Clonezilla. More specifically,
Clonezilla Live. This is a LiveCD that you can download and burn. Then, you can boot from the CD and create an image of your drive on another device (USB drive for example). This is FOSS, so the price is right.
We use Clonezilla with DRBL to maintain and deploy images across the network. It is a very powerful tool, yet simple to use.