Any suggestions welcomed. The big bugbear to my mind is that until you need to restore there is no way of being certain it works. Is there a solution to this please?
I guess one solution is to test restoring a backup. I use Acronis, but I sometimes think it's more trouble than it's worth.
Try Macrium Reflect free version, I've found it to be very good and from my experiences with Acronis in the past I find Macrium to be much better.
The only way I can think of that you can be sure that a restore will work without actually trying it is to back up individual folders and files. Something like Fee File Sync (http://freefilesync.org) makes that less onerous.