Zoyous

On my Mac, Time Machine to a usb hard drive is fantastic. On my PC, EaseUS backup software, although I've never had to use it to restore anything. It got good reviews... I also have several utility USB boot drives for PC.

I also manually copy important files to another usb hard drive once or twice a year and put that in our fireproof safe along w/ our other important documents.

I agree with you that partitions don't really help with drive corruption.  I mean sometimes some sectors go bad, but it is usually all or nothing for a consumer.  I usually just manually copy important files to a different drive every so often, and I prefer that method to wholesale backup.  I think of a HW failure as a chance to re-install the OS anyway, but I'm a weirdo like that, and I have easy access to Windows images.

I do like to partition my drives so that if I want to reinstall the OS, I can have an untouched partition that just stays the same between installs, but that is less and less important as most files (at least for business) are also in the cloud.