Backup--OT

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

I have a technical question that maybe one or more of you would be so kind
as to help with.
I've been bitten by disaster too many times not to be very concerned with
backup. I have now what is the ideal solution, except for one flaw: I take
the SSD drive out of my Lenovo Thinkpad (fairly easy to do, but requires
unscrewing one screw), and put it with the backup drive into a toaster-like
drive-duplicator from Aluratek that duplicates the SSD, sector by sector,
onto the backup drive. The result is a completely substitutable, bootable
dupe of my SSD (which I then replace in my Thinkpad).

The only problem is that I can't do this, of course, as a scheduled task.
I am doing physical drive duplication because via software, you can't
produce a bootable drive. But is making a clone image good enough? I have
tried Acronis, EaseUS, and Carbonite for making "images," but they aren't
bootable. As I understand it (through a glass, darkly), you boot your
system some other way, then "restore" the image. It's all smoke and mirrors
to me. I don't trust "booting some other way," even though the Thinkpad has
a system recovery partition on the main drive (i.e., my SSD). So, am I
being a scaredy-cat? Should I rely on images and just "get over it" re my
bafflement at what the restore process is? Would the end result be not just
the return of my data files but of all my OS settings, including the registry?
A final thought: is the image, like a virtual machine, just one file that
you only need a running computer to activate?

Thanks for the hand-holding.