OS backup

Newbie here...
Looking to backup my PC. About a month ago I lost 2 blocks on my hard drive both on the boot sector. After several weeks of reloading the OS and all the programs I decided that I needed a better answer for such failures. Tried Acronis OMG what a web of tentacles to remove when i tried to uninstall. Read a lot of good reviews in HDM 11. Begun trial, I am looking to fully test this product before I buy.
So if I have interpreted the manual correctly cloning is a one time deal copying the whole disk to another "spare" disk. No incrementals no differentials. To change the clone due to changes in the OS I need to re-clone.
If I want to periodically capture changes I will need to do a partition backup of the OS partition and perform a scheduled differential or incremental- I'm thinking differential. So far so good?
It appears that there is no ability to perform a scheduled full backup - Is this true?
If HDM 11 is capable of doing this is there away to have it automatically keep only X number of Full backups and or incrementals or is this strictly a manual operation?
Thanks for you help and your time!

 

PM has scheduling (and wonderfully uses Task Scheduler), so I'd assume HDM does.

Cloning is to duplicate a disk either for multiple deployments or to replace the cloned disk with another, not a good idea for backups.