A rant/Tips needed

I lost my first hard drive ever in January this year and I thought I should get a backup software. True Image had some pretty amazing scores from reviews and what the hey. I had some problems with "corruption" but the archive still showed a green tick mark everytime it got made but no biggie: I got info from the forums that if I could restore files from the backup or mount it then it should be ok, because herpy derp and Windows and kleenex and mousepads. I could mount it and get some data out of it so I though I was good.

Yesterday my system hard drive died again. But hey I got backups, right? WRONG! My both backups seemed to be "corrupted" and in True Image lingo that can and will mean absolutely everything. Cats, dogs, bananas, cows, Christmas, maybe my shoe was untied at some moment. So I couldn't restore the disk. I spent about 10 hours trying all the different tips I could google from pretty mad True Image clients, but I still had to install everything again. All the time I was thinking: "I paid these guys to feel secure and now I feel so damn betrayed."

I managed to restore some files/folders from the backups I had so I'm not completely furious. Now I'd just want to know is there something I could actually do to make sure my backups work? Is there a way that the program could actually check and validate a backup in Windows? I do not care about the blah blah blah salami blah cell phone radiation blah blah blah USB blah baseball-explanations here. The software was programmed to Windows and it should do it's job and I shouldn't boot up twice a week to try and validate it with some bootable USB stick.

If that isn't possible then I could use some tips on what backup software actually works so I can use that.

Cheers.