went through this back in november. Used Acronis True Image Home 2010 and an external USB drive to restore.
Here’s the thread where I talked about it.
While not being able to follow your procedure, because of not being familiar with all those backup software you used:
What’s the problem? Only real irreplaceable data you have is in your user/daw/whatever folders. To back up these … just drag them into your backup drive. Forget the fancy back-up/mirroring software packages.
And answer to your original title: “Can you restore an image from USB hard drive?”
Yes. I can restore anything I’ve backed up from any media I backed up to (unless it’s low-quality early CD-Rs, which were just $¤%&#!!!)
I just recovered my laptop with Arconis 10 from an image on a USB stick and an Arconis boot disk, worked perfectly.
I back up my “C” drive with Arconis on all of my computers regularly. Data, (on other drives) is obviously easy to back up and I do that daily. To re-install Windows and all my programs, do all the tweaks, permissions etc. takes me at least a day and I want to avoid that at all costs!
Yes re-installing the systems takes at most 1 day. At least for me, since I always have a re-install-to-do-list on my network drive. But how often you need to re-install your system because of disk crash (or similar event)? Happened to me ONCE during last 20 years (twice during my lifetime so far). Not frequent enough to have backup of the system drive.
If the reason for re-install is not disk crash (or similar event), but messing the system with different programs/drivers installed during the years, backups don’t help you anyway. BTW … right now being in middle of that … there’s something (or combination of some things) I’ve installed during last 2 years, which makes my DAW to have occasional hiccups. Planning to have a “clean install day” soon (that’s exactly the day I find my WinXP install disk, which was lost when I moved to my new house).