Two packages come to mind. Ghost 4 Linux and Partimage.
 
 
Ghost 4 Linux works very well and I have used it with no problem.
 
Partimage makes a compressed (bz2 or gz) image that you can save to your hard drive and restore to a like size partition, if you trash your distro. I have used this tool as well.

Thanks for the info Danleff. I will try one of these.

Forget 'Simply', go with ProMepis. Trust me, it is way better. A little glitchy but better.

Here is another idea: if your drive is big enough, resize the partition to make room for a new one. Install Mepis on the new partition. I find, with multilpe distros, installing the boot loaders to floppies can be less dangerous and confusing.

Very true. I always do a boot disk as the option for the bootloader, test the installation, then add it to lilo or grub if all goes well. If you have the hard drive space, this works well.
 
I forgot to mention. If you use Partimage, you need to have a working distro to backup and recover from. I can't remember if it has a cdrom version, but I believe that there is one on the site. For most installed distros, the compression is fairly large, so that burning it to a dvd probably will be necessary. partimage will give you the final size of the gz or bz2 file that it creates, so you can judge this for yourself.

I was just experimenting with ghost 4 linux, but I don't see an option where I could ghost my distro to a specific folder in one of my partions. Is there a way to do this or is it going to ghost an image and overwrite over the HD partion that I select?
 
Also, ghost 4 linux is not bootable while I'm running linux?