Clone an internal hard drive, to a new, such as faster and or more memory, internal hard drive mounted temporarily in an external enclosure.b

So I have a dead hard drive, four invalid backups, and no way to recover

If the internal drive with the OS fails, replace it with the drive cloned externally, and boot from it after you replace the failed internal drive

Why pay for backup software that doesn't work and fills your hard drive with invalid backup files

During this process, the C: drive failed completely

With regard to Cloning a hard drive however, the manual and cloning video on the website clearly state:1