Question : Problem: Looking for the best bare metal hard drive image backup software

I support about 200 computers spanned over 8-10 businesses.  Data protection on all the servers is not an issue, but I have been thinking about performing bare metal image backups on all the workstations, to save me time when a hard drive failure occurs.  Just thinking about all the time needed to rebuild an OS install with all the small customizations for the user - not fun to do.  If I did regular image backups of the workstations, then I could just restore the image and catch it up to current time if needed.

The here is my questions...

What are some of the best options for bare metal image backup?  I have always used the older version of Norton Ghost that allows you to use the floppy to create the images.  This works in 2 ways.  It allows me to use just that one floppy to image unlimited computers at no cost.  The problem is that it is manual and requires  the computer to come offline during the process.  Newer versions run under Windows and use Shadow Copy to perform the image backups while the system is running.  The problem is that I would have to purchase a copy for all 200 machines - ouch!  

Are there other solutions I can consider?

Answer : Problem: Looking for the best bare metal hard drive image backup software

DriveImageXML is a free one that I use. However I run it from a BartPE bootable cd. It is a windows program, and supposedly supports shadow copy but I've never actually used that before. I'm also not sure how much it can be automated.

But... its worth looking into. It is one of the few imaging programs where the image is *only* as big as the data on the hard drive (e.g. a 500gb hard drive with 8gb used... image is 8gb, not 500gb).