How to question - Backup SSD OS and programs to secondary hard drive.

I didn't get any feedback or ideas, so I tried to wing it. My SSD is 128GB, but only using 30GB. My SATA HD is 2TB. I created two partitions on the SATA HD. One 100MB system partition and one 32GB partition for the OS and programs. I created a partition image of the SSD and restored it to the partitions on the SATA HD. There was an option to copy the MBR partition, but when I choose that option I got an error message that said MBR could not be restored to GPT partitions. After doing some research, it looks like Acronis is supposed to be able to do this. Anyhow, I could never get the OS to boot from the SATA HD. If anyone has any ideas of anything else I can try, I would appreciate any feedback.

With Legacy BIOS both disks would need to be MBR in order to boot from both drives. In a UEFI system both disks would have to be GPT in order to boot from both disks. When I installed a SSD drive in my desktop, I made an image of just the operating system partition. Then I disconnected the original drive and connected ONLY the SSD drive and performed a clean install to ensure all of the necessary boot files were written ONLY to the SSD drive. After setup finished, I used the bootable recovery media to restore just my operating system partition over the one that the clean install created leaving the boot partitions untouched. After that I reconnected the original drive and set the SSD drive as the highest boot priority in my UEFI menu so that it would load by default. Now I can boot from either drive, and if the SSD fails it will automatically load the OS from the HDD. I did the clean install so that the SSD and HDD would have unique boot loaders and identifiers. This reduces complications that may arise with having identical boot partitions on both disks. It also automatically hid the OS partitions from each other, however your results may vary.