I found Paragon Backup 17 Free fairly simple to use, with some good features. Some give you more in the paid version, but I'm not sure network access issues are going to be any different. I should also mention that I am only comparing the Free versions of the software here. Macrium provides even fewer options to connect.

The Macrium Win PE disk was no better for me in this regard, with similar difficulty getting the Network connected in the Rescue Media. The LAN is theoretically working, but I still can't get to the shares from the Rescue disk.

Then I found out that the LAN controller was already loaded by Win PE. Often there are hoops to go through with user credentials, and for example Paragon says you may need to load the INF file for the LAN controller but then I get a message that the 'Selected INF file does not include AMD drivers suitable for the device,' even after I finally figured out which INF file to load (based on a Paragon FAQ). Trouble is, I found it difficult to access my network after loading such media.

Once again, the main concern in my case has been that, since I've been saving backups to my NAS on my network, and also attempting to save to a USB share on a router, what do I do if I have to restore a backup of my OS disk? I have to use bootable Rescue Media for that. This would be of interest to you if you are comparing popular backup software, particularly if you plan to use it to back up over a network or USB share. This is a pretty long post, it's a report of what I found by researching and working with three different software backup packages.

Paragon backup and recovery 14