So if indeed your system drive died, is an image sufficient to restore to a new drive or...

should you periodically store a clone? Thank you!

 

Ratchet... as Brian K has been testing pretty thoroughly in other threads, you need to be sure that your imaging software can return your system to a BLANK storage volume. If an imaging solution can do this (some have been found not to be able to do certain configs <UEFI/GPT, etc.) then you really don't need a clone. Of course you better have your whole Storage structure backed up somewhere... all those special needed partitions for the newer system configs (reserves, EFI, MSR, etc.).

I keep a full system backup for reconstruction purposes (1-copy) then I image my SYSTEM partition only (not the whole disk) as time moves on. This allows me to easily construct a BLANK disk then restore my latest SYSTEM partition. But sometimes even this can go awry. When MicroSloth issued the Update 1 for Windows 8.1, the update process actually changed the size of the MSR (MicroSloth System Reserve) partition, basically causing some havoc for systems that have to know the status of those partitions. So maybe what you should really be imaging is the MSR and the SYSTEM partition as time moves on.

Simple systems (Legacy/MBR) are not really a problem with most imagers... it's the newer UEFI/GPT type systems that you need to be sure of... that's why Brian has been doing all this testing recently.