Reliability of "live" imaging

Official it may be, but the support here is almost entirely user-to-user [and, don't misunderstand, I applaud Acronis for the site nevertheless - more companies should do this sort of thing.] I simply spoke up in response to the question concerning reliability that launched this thread. The fact is, I've experienced a number of non-hypothetical (albeit undocumented) incidents that have raised my own concerns in this regard. Xpilot (I think it was) makes a valid point, though. I should begin doing my own precautionary testing to conclusively determine the fidelity of restoration. It has been some time now since I've seen any of the truly hair-raising anomalies, but the bank tells me the current incident (failure of the enhanced security verification) means the cookie had to have been deleted. So the cookie has somehow gone missing following restoration, and there is no easy way, after the fact, to say anything conclusive about its absence. You can only document this sort of thing by proactively taking (and preserving) your own system snapshot just prior to imaging, then taking another snapshot following restoration to see, before and after, how the file system and registry compare. I'm not really in a position to start this immediately (I'm in the middle of a relo right now) but will begin doing so as soon as possible.