I have used Ghost for around 10 years and Windows 7 imaging for 2, and I have never had a problem in all of that time. I must have done dozens of restores.
You are an expert. I am an average person. I have used Ghost for as many years as years and have had several failures. Fortunately, I did not depend on those attempts for critical work. Most of the time. There were some times I became very, very disappointed. So I learned.
My pint is that you have not way of knowing a method is going to work until you use it. The first time you use it has an unacceptable risk level. Unless you have some alternative n resource that is remover for the process. Namely, another drive that has the original aterial and not connected to the laptop.
The real problem is education. The user is not given enough education about how computers do fail and fail very badly. The fact that the failure rate may be one in 10,000 is not consolation when the failure was a fatal 100 % loss of data. Yet Automobile makers get sued if one out of 10,000 has a fatal accident.
The computer manufacturers are providing restore partitions for the users. That is not enough. There should be a way to resonate the OS withing dependency on the restore partition. Those who are experts take care of this. The uninitiated are at the mercy of vendors or makers who offer far too little support.
A bad backup/restore program can destroy almost anything on the hard drive, including partition table. Yes, I know is is not supposed to. I am talking about a program Thant has not been verified. You don't know what it can do. The computer makers are in a beater position to provide users with fool-proof methods.
Happily, Windows 7 has built-in features that make backup, restore and repair easier that before. Still, a new user needs to learn how to use them well. Unless one never uses the computer for serious work.
