The tool is called Backupper and made by AOMEI. It comes with all the features that many vendors would only provide in their payed for versions, such as Partition Cloning/Backupping, Drive Cloning/Backupping, OS Partition Cloning/Backupping, Differential Backups, Incremental Backups and so forth. It also supports scheduling, compression, hell you can even have the program send a notification email somewhere when it completed a task. Making a bootable medium is a breeze too; you simply use the built in facility which will make you a nice bootable PE. (A bootable Linux version is offered too, but i found it crap because it simply didnt work. The WinPE on the other hand was perfect.) As for reliability; i have made several OS backups now and restored them a couple of times to different drives just to see how it goes. So far not a single hitch. In every instance it did exactly what it was supposed to. Time to backup and compress the roughly 17GB of data on my 50GB OS partiton: Circa 6 minutes. Time to restore the backup: Circa 12 minutes. Not a lousy performance at all on a 7200RPM magnetical drive.
Now if you need a good rescue medium, AOMEI provide that too. This one is called AOMEI PE Builder and available here. If you put this on a flashdrive you will be able to boot into a normal Windows Desktop with Windows Explorer and full internet capability. AOMEI Backupper and Partition Assistant (more on that one below) are already installed in the image, which means you can use it to restore (or create) Backupper backups and/or partition harddrives with PA. It also contains a few other tools such as file managers, browser, 7zip, etcetera, plus you can add your own applications as well. Try it out, you wont be disappointed.
Partition Assistant is the 3rd freebie from AOMEI and available here. I didnt actually use it to partition anything yet, but i have used the 'Check for Bad Sectors' feature a couple of times to see if everything on the partitions i rearranged is in order. It is very full-featured for a free product as well, the only thing that i would actually need a licensed version for was to be able to handle my dynamic drives. All the rest i could ever need seems to be there, and then some. (Migrate OS to SSD or HDD, etc.) Like Backupper it also allows you to create a bootable medium in case you need to run it from outside Windows, and if youre using Win8 it can even create you a 'Windows To Go', which apparently is like a copy of your OS on a CD/DVD or flashdrive. Also definitely worth a try if youre looking for a solid freeware alternative.
Hope to have helped,
Happy Backupping.
