Your rescue strategy is interesting.Hard drive clones are great, except, all of the software I have tried has a fatal flaw; They require you to format the cloned drive, before you can make a new clone. The problem here arises in the fact that, between the time the hard drive is formatted and the time the new data is written to the cloned drive, there is no 'clone', so if my computer decides that of all times to die it'll die now (which sods law dictates would happen) then I am left with only a half-complete clone and a dead harddrive.
Totally unnecessary. Proper use of a reliable backup program like Macrium Reflect to implement a properly thought out back up strategy is all that is needed.I am beginning to question that whole image back-up as a viable way. Both the Paragon image and the Win7 image back-ups were a no go. I think now the way to go is just like said, buy another HD and clone it to the first and just keep alternating between the two when things get weird. I am going to go get another HD and try image back-up on that and see if is indeed because I am trying to image to a SSD. Of course the problem with your solution is if your using a SSD as the primary drive. Then you would need 2 SSD's to acomplish the swap method.