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I had the exact same problem and looked into several options but was unable to fix it. I would recommend "resetting Windows" which basically means reinstalling without deleting your personal files (although depending on the programs you use, you may lose some personal data that's not stored in the typical locations). You can do this without any recovery drive. Just get to the login screen and hold shift while clicking restart (after clicking the power icon on the bottom right of the screen). This will bring up a special recovery screen from which you can choose "Reset my PC" (you might have to explore the menu a bit to find this). At some point you will be given the option of whether or not to keep your files, so make sure to choose Yes. Once everything finishes, you will have a basically clean installation of Windows, with one HTML file on your desktop that describes all the programs that were effectively uninstalled by the reset. At this point you can reinstall your programs, and in some cases they will automatically find the local data that was preserved.
This assumes that you have already attempted to use system restore, and that failed. You can get to that from the same menu after shift-clicking Restart. That's much less destructive, so try that first. In my case it didn't work.
After this experience I'm improving my backup situation. In the past I've tried both Acronis and Microsoft's built-in options -- both of which are buggy, can silently fail, and are generally awful. I'm now trying out Macrium Reflect and based on my experience so far it seems far superior to both of those.