I am looking for a good way to backup my linux partition in a way that I can access the backuped files from a Windows pc. I want the entire drive backed up because I want to make sure I have all data and config files saved if I need them again because Im going to reinstall my computer. Can anyone help me out?
Not possible with a full backup of Ubuntu. Windows only reads Windows formatted partitions like NTFS or FAT32, but those formats do not support ownership & permissions which are required for Linux.
You can copy data files like photos, music or text to NTFS as ownership or permissions are not critical and can be easily reset when copied back into a new Linux install.
But if a full backup you need all of /home, possibly some of /etc if you changed any system or hardware configurations and export a list of installed applications to make it easy to reinstall. Some other applications may have data in other locations such as sql or other server type data.
You can use many tools to copy data, in uncompressed format or others in compressed formats that need others tools to read. But almost all only work from Linux, but you can use a liveCD or flash drive to read that data.
discussion of alternatives/strategy backups
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem
If you install your own system you are the system admin
Sysadmins: Everything they told you about backup WAS A LIE
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/12/storagebod_monomyth/
