For a real backup I use disk cloning. Drives are pretty cheap and it makes for a fast recovery. The drive my laptop came with is in a box awaiting the day the replacement drive dies so badly the Windows backups no longer work. There was some update MS pushed out that made it so the laptop could not find the drive it was booting from. That reminds me - pick up another point-version backup drive.
I've also found synctoy to be helpful for the data portion of the backup, mostly to keep a working version of a Wiki ready to run.
Every manufacturer of hard-drives has a series of drive that is terrible. Quantum, Seagate, Western Digital, Bernoulli, the jerks with the removeable media click-of-death drives. I'm sure that Samsung, Toshiba, and whoever bought the IBM drive business have all had some disaster. A good drive lasts a long time; a bad one, not so much. There's only so much that accelerated testing can pick up and only so much design can cope with. The bad-cap fiasco that damaged Dell computer's reputation (and showed up in my old Samsung monitor,) for example.
So, do your backups as if someone is going to break into your business or house, steal your computer and set fire to the place, then fill it with 6 feet of water. If you have all that covered, you'll do OK. PS: It's that last part with the fire resistant safe filling with water that really makes the day bad. Read ACM Risks, but don't blame me if you can't sleep afterwards.