I had a motherboard failure (on a second home PC) and when it failed it also corrupted the hard drive.  No problem, I thought, as I have a couple versions of full hard drive backups on a USB connected hard drive.  After I replaced the motherboard (had to use a different board as the exact replacement was no longer available) I booted with my Acronis 2012 (and a 2013 version) Linux rescue disc.  The 2012 would only boot to garbage on the screen, the 2013 would boot but I had no mouse or keyboard support.  I have 2013 Plus Pack on my operation system so I created a WinPE (V3) Acronis rescue disc and used that to boot the new system.  It booted up (both in regular and UEFI modes) and I attempted to restore the hard drive from the backup.  Every time I tried Acronis would abort with a message (don't remember exact words) about unable to continue as the backup is bad.  I tried the three different backups and Acronis reported the same thing on each.  I took the USB drive to my operational PC and plugged the hard drive (that I wanted to restore) into my USB connected hard drive interface (drives plug directly into the interface) and tried restoring from the USB drive to the hard drive, but it was no go there too.  I copied one of the backups (the latest) to an internal hard drive and tried to restore from that.  I was successful, but only after three tries. 
 
I downloaded a trial version of Macrium and did a backup - with the system that had the motherboard replaced - to the same USB drive I had been using for backups.  I created a WinPE/Macrium rescue disc and tried a restore from that.  No problem and Macrium even completed the backup faster and the restore faster than Acronis.    I purchased a "home pack" (4 licenses) and have installed Macrium on my dual boot Win7/Win8 system, the second home system with the new motherboard and a Laptop.  I created separate WinPE/Macrium backups for the Win7/Win8 system and each of the other systems as I noticed Macrium profiles the hardware when its creating the rescue disc.  Also it used WinPE V3 for the Win 7 system and WinPE V4 for the Win 8 system.   One WinPE/Macrium rescue disc may work for everything, I haven't tried that yet but will  

paragon!  we left acronis 3 yrs ago.. maybe 4 before that was Angel?

My favorite has been ShadowProtect. It is enterprise-class, but the Desktop version is affordable. It's saved my butt more than once.

Regards,
Dan

I have used Acronis very successfully. But I still believe the best way is to go out and get a new spare drive and connect it to one of the spare drive ports on your motherboard. Then when you are happy with your system you do a perfect clone of your entire C drive bit by bit from the existing C drive to the new drive in real time. When you go into this mode Windows shuts down but does not boot into Windows again. It only partially boots up for Acronis to make the clone. 

You then can disconnect it and store it away. And you can do this every 3 months or so to keep the copy up to date.  When my C drive started to fail (making a very bad scraping sound!) I simply pulled out the faulty drive and put the backup in its place. My entire computer worked normally. I had to only re authorise two plugins out of everything on my entire system.

That was the second time Acronis failed me.  It won't get a "3rd strike" two is all it gets.  The first time, I made a backup of an SSD drive as I was going to upgrade the firmware in the SSD drive and the firmware upgrade deletes all data on the drive.  After I upgraded the firmware in the drive (it was a Win 8 install on a separate drive in a dual boot system) I attempted to restore from the Acronis backup but it wouldn't complete.  I didn't have much on the Win 8 drive as I had just recently installed it so I just reinstalled Win 8 from the install disc and went on.  But, the time I really needed it, I had to "jump through hoops" to get it to restore.

 Sorry to hear that. I lost faith in acronis a few yers ago when I lost a raid controller and replaced it with the same model and acronis failed me. I've gone back to hard copy back ups with blu ray-R disks for just my important data. With CW Pyro or any other data burning software, I'm able to burn 25 gig in about 30 min.

 I have a full acronis image backed up on an external drive, but I don't do it as often, last BU is months old and i don't have much confidence that if I needed it it would work.

Unfortunately, the only way to be sure an image will restore correctly is to restore the image. If that works you have gotten back to what you just imaged, and some confidence that you will be able to do it again. If it fails, you may have screwed the partition you imaged, and have an image that does not work. That is a good reason not to test the image this way, unless you have a spare partition to test the restore to, and why I never depend on an image to backup irreplaceable data. Over the years I have used a number of imaging programs, and none have been as reliable as I had hoped. If a disk image works when I need it, I consider it a gift. 

I really need to get coning software and am glad I read this thread. Right now for 40 bucks I can get two licenses of Paragon (or three for 60).

My biggest hurdle right now is choosing the hard drive to backup to. I shop, I read reviews and it seems like everyone that is affordable has, near the top of the reviews... "it died". I don't know what HDs to buy. I need to backup two laptops and one, possibly two desktops. So I am thinking of trying to find some sort of 3.5" drive holder that I can use to insert whatever drive I am backing up to, or I guess I could get 3 or 4 enclosures... but it is the drives that are scaring me. Can someone recommend good hard drives for backup/cloning and tell me where the pricebreak is, so that I get something good enough without spending more or less than I should.
I like the price on the Paragon right now... 19.99 is really hard to beat, if it works.

Thanks for any advice.

Julien

Choosing a backup drive is easier than you think. Failure rates for hard drives are astonishingly low. If you have the data on a working drive, and the data on a backup drive the chances of both failing at the same time are almost non-existent. Your backup drive can be from sh*t city and you will still probably get it to run the one time it is necessary to restore your data. The only time you need a perfect drive is when you only have one copy of the data.

you will still probably get it to run the one time it is necessary to restore your data. The only time you need a perfect drive is when you only have one copy of the data.

 
You are the master of the obvious... obviously, I am not. I never thought of it that way. DOH. Thanks, I will go away now, lol.
 
Julien