It is personal preference with any good system backup application.
I have an nvme my O/S is installed on and a docking station. I choose to system clone to a sata SSD regularly.
I use AOEMI Backupper technician Plus.
It has never failed and boots perfectly from the sata ssd clone. All the others mentioned are equally as good too.

 

MiniTool Partition Wiz

 

Yes " deepVST . my Audiolover. iam Clone my 1TB SSD to an 2TB SSD in 7 min. very fast . all programs running after clone . No PC .and it is faster than Software metod. in the past i am using Clonezilla. and most of the Programms dont run . needed Keygen etc.
Our Audiolover GianaSister

 

Make a bootable USB key with Strelec Win10 PE and there you'll find any possible tool already mentioned above to clone/backup etc.
Then you can choose what is best depending on the results you'll have.

 

One additional thought. Be sure to check you can restore your backup.

Even the best backup practice fails if the restoring part does not work accurately or is readily available.

I have some issues with Acronis where if you backup to an external USB drive, Acronis may not see the backup depending on where the drive is connected (USB2 or 3), or if you boot from Acronis Linux or PE, or if you have a RAID configuration, or if the chipset drivers are not on the Acronis boot drive etc etc... (I had all of these happening at one point or another). I know my way around these issues now with Acronis but took me a long time to figure it out....

I assume this is would also be true for any other backup program and it heavily depends on how complex your PC is setup (I have 2 RAID0 arrays, two NVME drives and 4 external USB drives, on a Ryzen platform --> Acronis goes nuts with this config at least in my case lol).

Cheers

 

I had to swap my system drive (HDD or SSD) on various machines a few time during the last 10 years, and I always used ACRONIS True Image with complete satisfaction.

 

In my experience, doing the backup tasks in an external environment to the main OS (via a PE or any recovery OS) helps security-wise with file management and running various second-opinion virus scanners before imaging the drive.

 

Last edited: Apr 4, 2022

Most decent backup systems have a 'verify' function. It's worth it for the integrity of a potential restoration.

 

I backup my drive system everyday with Macrium Reflect 8. When I need to restore it, it never fails.

 

There are quite a few good options for backup software, but when it comes to the method, a disk image is the best way.
Incremental backup schemes are risky and rely on one original.
It takes less than 1/2 hour to back up my C drive (134 Gig used of a 250G drive).

I have been using EaseUS Todo Home backup for years, and have restored system drives well over 100 times, from small images with just a few installed programs up to systems as I have now, full of programs.
The reason for so many restores not due to drive failures, but from experimenting and testing and wanted to go back to EXACLTY the way my machine was before the experiment. NOTHING beats that ability.
No question about what might be left behind or if it will work. I began to be fearless about testing & downloading from sketchy places for a while, but even once I'd tired of that and decided to only use trusted sources, I continued to make very frequent backups.

With cheap mass storage & fast SSDs, creating backups does not need to be an overnight thing, and I have played online games while running backups without realizing it until afterwards. (Using Todo backup)
I began my real experience with backups using Acronis in a small business in 2000, and that was great, although it could be confusing in some ways.
I find TODO backup easier. I usually purchase a new upgrade every few years (was running different purchased versions on 3-4 computers).
But just recently I got a newer (v13.5) version from a "friendly" site and found the speed was much faster than the 10.0 i'd been using.
Out of all the restores I have had perhaps 3 fails in recent years (since maybe around 2010)
Nothing is infallible and the key is to back up regularly.

I do a backup of my C drive about every 2 weeks, but occasionally longer if I've not changed much, and sometimes more frequently if I am installing anything major or questionable, or have made significant changes
(i don't want to have to repeat them if my drive should fail).

 

Acronis is OK
...just don't forget to disconnect the external drive with the cloned image before rebooting