If you're using Win7, it does pretty good disk images itself. The images are also compatible with programs such as Acronis. But you mention Vista. Ah, well.
Acronis does very good backups: full images, incrementals, differentials, and also real time continuous backups.
For free, there's Comodo Backup which always seems buggy. I've tried liking the company, but I don't trust its products now. There's a Chinese clone of Partition Magic called Easeus. The company also has backup tools. I've used Easeus a lot, but its backup stuff seems unreliable in my environment.
There are a bazillion tools out there. I change from time to time, but right now I'm basically using Win7 and Acronis for image backups (that's paranoia for you) and Allway Sync to make sure my most important data is not only in many places (internal drive (RAID1), external drive, network RAID, cloud), but is also simply files 'cos I don't trust backup formats :-)
Personally, I'd go for one NTFS partition.