This is our setup/procedure.
HP Microserver with RAID 1. (Western Digital Red 3TB x two)
This is running OpenMediaVault which is a sort of FreeNAS system.
Six USB 3 hard drives, each with a different coloured sticker (dot) for identification.
First a complete Acronis or Macrium Reflect image is done to a USB 3 hard drive. Then the USB 3 drive gets plugged into our HP Microserver RAID1 storage and the image is copied. The image is now on three drives.
(If the customer's drive has bad sectors we use DDRescue to make an image.)
If the drive is good we then do a FABS backup to a different USB 3 drive. If unbootable, we use a WinPE disc with the FABS plugin.
We have also run a FABS backup on a mounted DDRescue image if the drive is bad. Now with FABS 5 we can mount the image and transfer straight from there. (ImDisk seems to work better than Osfmount for this.)
We have a different coloured self adhesive dot on each USB drive. We place matching coloured dots on the PC so we know exactly what drive contains that PC's data.
The USB drive/s would be cleaned after the job is done and the image stored on our RAID1 kept for a month.
This can add a lot of time to the job but I would rather be able to produce the customer's data if something went wrong. Also, I try to do the imaging overnight or while we are doing other things.
We have a machine on the bench that came in for 'no display'. On the bench it booted straight into Windows. After a few checks, decided to image the drive before going further.
Halfway through the Acronis image using boot CD, it says there are unreadable sectors on the drive. Usually you can skip these if they are minor. It didn't. It hung halfway through.
Decided to shut down and boot PartedMagic to DD-Rescue. BIOS throws up SMART errors about the drive that were not there before. Got a usable image with DDRescue - only 35MB lost.
This is a good example of how things can go south quick. I had a drive go down during a virus scan a few years back and that was an awkward situation to say the least!