I was hoping to clone my 120 GB SSD drive using Acronis disk cloning software, as a backup for my Sonar X2a system, but have read some
discouraging results about restoring to another SSD drive. Anybody have any experiences with this process, can it be done ?
 
Also, I've made a system image, using the Windows 7 Pro (SP1) backup, and wonder if it's as reliable a system back-up as it claims to be ?

Yes, in my experience, the Win7 backup software is extremely reliable ... a reasonable way to go.

I'm curious about others discouraging results.

My SSDs oft fail (every year or 2) ... and (perhaps like you) I'm concerned about 'never-having-to-reinstall-the-DAW.

I restored onto 2 NEW 250GB SSDs in RAID 0 ... last week (before installing X2a).  The only hitch was IKM's ARC needed re-validating (a problem I've reported to IKM ... which received no reply)

My strategy is perhaps not the best and I've been lucky during SSD corruption (corrupting mere data files instead of boot files)

* So I do monthly backup's up to about 6 months ... manually changing the Winbackup directories name ... so windows does not overwrite each backup with a 'fresh' backup.  Many-a-time I've had to use the restore disk to re-name directories ... to get a 'better' backup to restore onto my SSDs.  

Of course with Win7, there are volume-shrinking and volume-expanding issues, Raid vs. AHCI ... and other knowledge for SSDs vs HDs, etc.

Acronis may be better (easier) ... but my Win7 Backup seems OK so far.

Hope this helps.

I'm using Acronis with both my SSD and conventional hard drives.  I haven't had any problems restoring to an SSD drive.  Acronis (the latest version) is supposed to be able to restore to a different size drive - SSD or conventional.    I have had problems with "cloning" a drive but as I always make full backups of my drives (I don't use the incremental so its not really an issue) - if I restore from a full backup its basically the same as cloning (making a copy) of the drive. 

One gotcha that I had to do with my new system I built last year with a gigabyte motherboard and UEFI BIOS.  One SOME (not all) the standard Acronis bootable rescue disc (uses Linux) will not recognize hard drives in some newer motherboards, and mine was one of them.  I got this from one of the gurus on the Acronis forum and the fix was to get the Plus Pack (which I already had) for Acronis which allows creating a "WinPE" Acronis bootable rescue disc.  WinPE will recognize the drives on my system and allow rebuilding/restoring if needed.    The other popular disc backup software, Macrium, also requires making a WinPE bootable disc.

I had to restore one of my SSD's late last year as I got a firmware update for the SSD and the firmware stated that it would destroy any data on the drive.  I first made a full backup of the SSD to my backup USB connected hard drive, did the update (a worthwhile in my case as it sped up the SSD), then used the WinPE Acronis bootable disc to boot up and restore the SSD from the created backup.

I clone using acronis couple times a month. I use synctoy to keep the few important files updated between clonings. Seems simple and no problems to me except my clone-to disk failed a few days ago. 
I use the free Seagate version of acronis that came with the 1t seagate disk I use for data files.

The good news about a clone is that if my disk fails I am up an running again in 3-4 minutes. 

Someone somewhere said it is better to boot from the clone and do all the updates rather than keep cloning. Not sure about that. I think my clone failed just because it is an ocz.

John

Thanks for the replies guys, some great info here.

@philip - Glad to hear someone re-inforce that the Win 7 system back-up method is good.
 . . . sorry, my confusion . . . the discouraging results I was reading about was for cloning an HDD to an SSD.
(Partition alignment issues, boot manager not copied, software copyrights . . .)

I was hoping to clone my SSD to another SDD as a quick swappable back-up solution, in case of any drive failures.
I have heard that many SSD drives don't last as long as they're rated for, and wonder if audio recording is harder on them ?

From my internet searching regarding this, I found what seems to be a simple way of doing this:

"If you have a spare disk, you can simply use the built in Windows 7 System Image backup and restore, it works fine and will backup.restore everything.
You first do a system image backup of everything (by default W7 will select both the boot and the system partition) to your external USB drive. You create the bootable recovery DVD, Then swap the old drive for the new one, and do a restore from the image stored on the external drive"

However, as in the post above by fireberd, seems there's always some computer curveball you would never know about that might cause things to not work properly. Guess I'll have to try it to be sure.