and you said that you did the zip thing a couple of times?
Yes, at least half a dozen times. Most of them were using a ZIP file made from the active boot drive. Of course, a ZIP file from an inactive drive also works. I will note, that I do NOT allow normal software to be on the boot drive. The simple procedure is: boot to an alternate boot system (usually my previous eCS install), format the drive, and unzip the backup to it (I use the eCS Archive Viewer, for simplicity). Reboot, and make sure that it actually works (hasn't failed yet, for me). It may be necessary to use Sysinstx, under some conditions, but I haven't needed it (I only use JFS drives).
I also ZIP up my programs/data drive, as an alternate backup to what I do with RSync. I did do a test restore on one of my test systems, and it worked, but I haven't had to do it on a "live" system, yet (that ZIP file is a little over 12 GB, and it contains a 10 GB virtual disk file for VBox).
It has been about 5 years since I actually tried to restore a boot drive from a BA/2 backup. It didn't work (I was able to reproduce the problem, every time I tried it, on multiple systems), so I went looking for a better solution, and came up with ZIP. I do recommend the latest version, so it can handle files (in and out) that are larger than 2 GB. Boot drives probably don't need that, but it doesn't hurt. I also looked at ARJ, and RAR, but they were slow, and clumsy, compared to ZIP (ARJ seems to be better, IMO, but it has way too many parameters, most of which are completely useless). What ZIP/UNZIP needs is a front end so the user can do easy selection of files and directories, for backup and restore.
And finally as for Rsync it chokes in a lot of situations
Actually, it doesn't. I have reported a crash problem when there are invalid EAs on a file, and SHL says he will find a way to fix the problem (apparently it is something in the kernel that doesn't work right). ZIP has trouble with those files too. I still haven't figured out where the invalid EAs are coming from (I suspect EVFSGUI, but I can't prove it). Other than that, I haven't seen any problems with RSync, for a LONG time, and I use it a lot.