Ages ago, did a scathing condemnation of the Todo backup software. Was fully deserved at the time. They did the free version that did not allow cloning from an external drive. Could clone to the external but not from the external back. You did not know this until you needed the reverse clone and were blocked until you fired up the plastic. Taking miserable advantage of you when you are at the bottom of the pit.
 
Subsequent versions somewhere along the line have changed this, removed the immoral ransom. You can go in either direction now.
 
Big problem I faced trying to clone a problem drive. Acronis 2015 crapped out. AEOMI not up to the task.
 
Todo ripped thru the job and succeeded where Acronis bellied up to a black screen.
 
Worth a look.
 
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm
 
John

I've looked around at the latest and settled for Macrium Reflect.  It is a fine piece of software, and well documented.  Fast and reliable.  https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
 
I had been using the Win 7 image tool in control panel ever since upgrading from XP.  But the Macrium scheduled backups and the automatic retention rules are much easier to deal with. 
 
Plus Macrium runs quicker, and the image process uses better compression, so that the image file size is considerably smaller than the Windows version.  It takes about 25 mins to image 130GB data in use from my SSD C: drive.  The image file size ends up being about 98GB.  It takes about 60 minutes to image the 274GB in use on my data HDD.  I am using a USB3.0 portable drive to write the images on.

Thanks Abacab,
 
Have Macrium around here in the wood pile somewhere and probably updated many times since I tried it last.
Acronis 2015 crapped out on me. Big disappointment. Neither the windows level nor the rescue disc would clone.
Todo did the trick at the expense of a 7 hour clone. The hard drive was only 250 GB. At least it did the job.
Will revisit Macrium on your advice. See if I can speed things up a bit.
 
John

JohnKenn
Thanks Abacab,
 
Have Macrium around here in the wood pile somewhere and probably updated many times since I tried it last.
Acronis 2015 crapped out on me. Big disappointment. Neither the windows level nor the rescue disc would clone.
Todo did the trick at the expense of a 7 hour clone. The hard drive was only 250 GB. At least it did the job.
Will revisit Macrium on your advice. See if I can speed things up a bit.
 
John

Yup, you're not the first to report being let down by Acronis. 
 
The most important thing about any backup/recovery plan is that it just works.  I always build my recovery media right away, and test that I can boot from it, as well as access the source image and target drive for  a restore.
 
I set up my father's PC with Acronis years ago because of the hidden restore partition you could enable on the boot drive, so that there was always a one button restore if things went south and he needed to recover.  I custom built the PC for him and he was several hundred miles away, so remote support only went so far.  Acronis worked fine then, but since then the OS, disk formats, and BIOS have all had tremendous changes, such as UEFI and GPT.
 
So far I am very impressed by what Macrium gives away for free!  First class!  The only thing I would want from the paid version is the ability to register for their support forum.  But that requires a license.  The free version does everything else I could ever need.  And if you read the well written manual, your questions should be few anyway.

Recently a friend brought me her laptop with a dead HD.  She had luckily saved her data, but there was no saving the factory recovery partition which was damaged with the drive.  She hated losing that since it had saved her bacon a couple times. 
 
I had planned to just install something like TODO backup or Paragon, when I found this:
 
http://www.backup-utility.com/okr-free.html
 
It's basically the same as a backup image program in that it creates a recovery partition (that can be hidden), only it is accessed on bootup by pressing a key -- just like any pre-installed factory recovery.  Well, long story short, the restore worked like a charm twice! (Once for me, then for my friend who tried it to make sure it worked for her).
 
Personally, I prefer something like TODO, since I do a regular backups, while this utility seems more intended for factory backup/restore.  But let's face it, many here don't do backup images at all, so this option would be ideal for them: a one-time, set and forget solution.  Better to restore to factory setup, than have to spend a week reinstalling and activating software.

That's good to know.  It reminds me of the old Acronis one-click recovery partition. 
 
But I like how AOMEI One key Recovery gives you the option to store the recovery image on a secondary internal drive, or an external USB drive.  That make a lot more sense now if you are running a small SSD as your boot drive, as you wouldn't necessarily have the free space to hold the image there.
 
But since it puts the WinPE recovery partition on your boot drive, with either option, I wonder how you would boot to the recovery menu if your hard drive completely failed.  I don't see any mention of burning an iso recovery disk or flash drive in case of complete boot drive failure.
 
In any case, this would be handy to use for any computers you support for non-techie family and friends.  If their data gets corrupted by a bad update, or a malware attack, just push a button.  And it appears that you can refresh the recovery image from time to time to keep up with major changes to the system, so a recovery wouldn't have to send you back too far.  As long as you backup your data to an external drive or the cloud, you should be fine!