[@TK] I bought the drive(s) from Amazon. I don’t know anything about validating the hard drive. I don’t think you need to go through a dog and pony show to do a back up. I tried both versions of Ashampoo’s Back ups. The only one I thought was decent was way back. I can’t even remember which version it was, but 25 and 26, for me, was worthless and not worth the time to screw around with trying to get them to work.
I ended up using the free version of EaseUS TODO backup Free. Couldn’t be easier.