Lady Fitzgerald said:
I'm getting the impression that you have your system files and your data all on the same partition. If your system files (OS and programs) are on their own partition, it doesn't take much longer to restore from an image of that partition than it does to do a system restore. It takes less than ten minutes to image my 62.5GB boot drive and verify it. Restoring an image takes less than an additional five minutes of boot time.

Although imaging is the best way to backup system files, it is horribly inefficient for backing up data files. A folder/file syncing program, such as FreeFileSync, is much faster and doesn't subject the backup drive to nearly as much wear and tear. It takes only a couple of minutes to backup 1.12TB of data with FreeFileSync on most days whereas an image would take two or three hours.
Absolutely not, I reserved separate partitions/drives for storing data and even software's working/output folders aren't on the system partition.
An imaging software is NOT what I'm looking after also I already said several times that I have it.