I tried CloneZilla and it failed to complete; searching for the error it threw proved to be a waste of my time...
Moved on to Remastersys and found that it is so primitive and lacking in options as to be useless; meaning that it cannot be told WHAT & WHERE to back up... a severe disappointment. (I have a spare partition with lots of stuff stored in it - and there's no way to tell it NOT to back that up - which was further complicated by it telling me my data was too big for a CD...WHAT ?? A CD ??? I had a writable DVD in the burner and I guess it doesn't 'speak' DVD sometimes, so I just gave up on it.)
The best solution I've found:
Redo Backup (here)- holy cow is this great !!!
I was able to make my backup to my USB stick in an amazingly short period of time, and restored it quickly as well - and it booted right up with ZERO problems.
If there's anything else equal or better than Redo Backup I'd love to hear of it, but for now I am very, very satisfied.