You're dead right. The number of even high-profile backup programs that can't cope with the slightest error upon either reading the backup medium, or writing to the target device, is depressing. This is the real world. Shit happens. The option to skip a few bad blocks should be available - yes, it's not perfect, but it might be "good enough" for your needs (I don't care that msvcrt400.dll can't be restored, I do care that Contract Agreement 2018 XYZ Corp.docx can), the restore part of the backup software shouldn't be OCD (although it should report any errors to you, with appropriate retry options). Yes, I know that compression muddles the waters, but breaking the backup into individually-compressed blocks, rather than a single stream of any-error-then-you're-screwed can help with that.

Thanks for the tip - I'm aware that I should replace the drive, which I will at some point soon. A new one would be faster, not to mention, have a lot more space (GB/$ is much better now). I've never found an imaging solution that works on Windows 7, that can transfer data from a HDD/SSD to another SSD, so the inertia is making me put this off - it'd take me about 3 days to reinstall everything from scratch. I've tried Paragon Migrate OS to SSD, Acronis, Ghost (admittedly, older versions of those two), and possibly even CloneZilla - none of them seemed to work, Windows 7 just detected something had changed and failed to boot, when started from the new drive. I've tried this with a few systems now.

The first SSDs I had (two of them) were OCZ - both failed, and did so suddenly after 9-12 months and without prior warning, resulting in total data loss on the drives (thankfully, I have good backups). I've tried other vendors and had similar misery. I bought an expensive workstation about 5 years ago with an Intel SSD, and I'm still using this now, in fact, I'm typing this reply on that machine. Sure, it's had hard power-offs when things have locked up occasionally, and its wear level is slowly decreasing, reporting the odd bad sector using Intel's drive maintenance tool, but it's still running fast and strong after 5 years. Due to my positive experience with this Intel SSD, I also bought an Intel SSD drive more recently (2 years ago) for my Thinkpad laptop, and that's still going strong too (despite me hard-powering it off several times, but maybe I was lucky). One of the other-brand SSDs that failed, not OCZ, did so just after a hard power-off, so I think there's some substance to this claim. I almost always buy Intel now (also tried SanDisk - working great, but not enough power-user use to know yet) - Intel are not always the fastest, but they're pretty quick and in my experience, very reliable. (First post here ever, caused me to sign up to Slashdot after lurking for around 5 years so I could reply to this)