To clone or not to clone...

I was under the impression that to do a "perfect" backup, every single bit, you would use clone. That way if your machine grew corrupted, you could restore every byte and bit, e.g. prior to picking up a serious virus that infected the very OS, FAT, etc.. My impression in the past was that this is how Ghost worked, making a perfect "disk image."

This would be as opposed to just copying every file by its file name on a "traditional backup" which would just copy all the files back to the P.C. upon restore. However that wouldn't necessarily eviscerate all of the virus. To pick one example, the bad guys could infect hiberfil which Acronis leaves alone during its ops (unless overridden). That may be a bad example, but I hope you see my point.

Does the "regular backup" as opposed to a "clone" give you that degree of protection? Or could it, if I took the additional step of formatting the HD first? If I formatted drive C, booted my Acronis rescue CD, and restored my "regular backup" (not clone), would I end up with the exact same machine I had when I started the backup?

Forgive me. I'm really not a tech idiot like my mother, but I know enough to know that I often am hugely ignorant about what I'm talking about here!