Good points Geoffsplace. We made Ghost our first choice because we found it would clone faulty drives successfully more often than Acronis. The only annoying thing with Ghost is it would stop the clone if it found 1 bad sector. We had a few times where we'd leave a drive to clone overnight only to find it stopped 5 minutes after we walked out the door. Thankfully there are a couple of options to tell it to continue cloning so we ran it from a batch file with these options set.
In our experience Acronis would sometimes lock up with faulty drives - sometimes we'd leave it another 24 hours and it would eventually get through, sometimes it would be a complete lock up. With that said though Acronis was our backup for faulty drives that Ghost wouldn't clone (which would sometimes happen) and there were times when Acronis did the job successfully. They're both good tools, and I'd recommend having both available.
For drives that wouldn't clone with either tool (or were taking too long) my go-to tool was TestDisk (which I'd use to selectively recover important data, instead of the whole drive). It's not a clone tool but a data recovery tool and I consistently find it can recover files when other tools can't. It is fiddly to use for recovery though - it's a command-line tool and you have to choose each folder you want to copy. TestDisk also lets you find and rewrite the partition table if it get's corrupted. Awesome tool, and it's also free.
One other tool for selectively copying from failing drives is Unstoppable Copier. It lets you tell it how many times to retry copying each sector before giving up and moving on. This level of control is great for letting you choose how much you want the data vs how quickly you want to recovery to run.
Regarding keeping backups for 30 days - absolutely agree. It costs very little to do this, and can save you big time.
