ZFT,
I use Acronis all the time. It is a great app and as far as I am concerned it has almost everything you need. Just being able to save all e-mails is something I particularly like.
As for cloning a disc I do just that. I back-up my C Drive to another drive and its byte for byte. I am assured that if my C Drive went bust, as it has, you simply restore to a fresh HDD.
Your back-up drive should have plenty of space on it because each backup is going to be the same size as the drive you are cloning. But you can delete a previous backup when you have completed the fresh one of course.
Good stuff.