Ask HN: What are you using for local PC backup/imaging?

We've been using Ghost for years. Yeah, it's got warts and yes, it has caused data loss. The "feature" I hate the most is how it can fail silently. If it can't complete a backup for any reason you can go days and weeks without knowing it. There's no way to tell it to put-up a big red warning window on the screen if, for example, the backup destination drive is full, can't connect to it or any other failure. I think it changes the little icon on the task-bar but that's pretty much lame.

I've been looking for a solid and reliable tool to migrate away from Ghost. I was just looking at this:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-professional/

What they say about being able to restore to dissimilar hardware could be huge if it works. I definitely want to hear form HN'ers who might have experience doing this.

Context: Our engineering systems have four hard drives and tons of software on them. It takes a solid month to migrate a machine to new hardware because you pretty much have to start from scratch and re-install everything.

This, BTW, is one of my HUGE disappointments with Microsoft. In the old days applications and the OS were decoupled. Today, if we need to migrate to a bigger-faster machine with a newer OS we have to start from scratch and reinstall applications such as SolidWorks (with all the add-ons we have), Xilinx tools, EDA tools, compilers, file viewers, Office, editors, etc. It's a nightmare.

And that's why most of our engineering systems are still running Vista. You just get stuck because migrations are very costly in terms of man-hours, not dollars.

We are now looking to migrate to Windows 10 and the question of backup, drive imaging and restoration has come-up. I truly don't think Ghost is up to the task.

Is Paragon a good product? Are there better alternatives?