Acronis is my choice. It is superb backup application. Stable, easy (you wont make any mistake when backing up or restore. You know how costly backup mistake is). It can back up, restore from and to usb peripheral, samba, ftp.
If you back up slice which contains MBR, when you restore, it offers you the option to restore only MBR, slide or both. It can read standard windows, linux and freebsd file system.
5 and half star from me
PS: But lack of backing up in real time without rebooting and not being able to read file and dir within the backup image makes me think about another backup utility