Currently of that type, ie imaging backup... I'm going with Aomei Backupper available for free at
Best Free Backup Software for Windows 10, Windows 8.1/8, Windows 7, Vista, XP
It has a util to create a bootable CD/DVD or USB thumb drive ( if you system support booting that way ) that has the main program built into it so you can restore the image if problems do happen. Like any of these type of boot disks, you must first test it to ensure you can get to your local hard drive as well as the drive you used to backup onto.
An image backup with it... will take up to the amount of used disk space or less ( since it compresses it )... so your backup medium needs at least that amount of space.
The program also allows you to mount the image you created as a disk that you can browse and copy files from if it's needed. Please note, that with image backups like this... sometimes getting a file that is located in user folder area other than your own and has security protection on it ( the default with many systems now ), may not be possible due to system security settings. In these cases, then getting to those files would either require a standard file backup or you having to completely restore the image back to the computer just to get to the file. In short, I usually rely on the image backups... but I also keep a file backup around just in case. Most of the time, since you'd be running the image on the same system it was created on... getting to the files within that image isn't an issue because your Windows is using the same security credentials. Of course, this last part applies to any backup type made by any program... it isn't limited to just this one.