I¿ve had a PC since 1985 and this was the first time I¿ve paid for a backup program. I have been real good at doing backups. For one thing, I wanted to do a full image backup. It was a timely purchase, because a week after I installed it and did my first complete backup, I ran into a software problem that gave me the blue screen of death every time I tried to boot. Other than safe mode, my PC was dead.
I have my PC 240 GB HD partitioned into drives C through I. With C being the O/S, E being all programs I¿m not forced to install on C, and all the other drives contain just data. I also have a 750 GB external USB drive. This is the drive I use for all my backups.
After trying several recovery methods, including Restore points. I finally decided to restore my C and E drive images. I booted using the Acronis CD. Working my way through the restore option was difficult. I had to reference the manual to pick the correct options. Some things I¿m still not clear on. That¿s all mute anyway, because I was never able to restore my files. When I finally got to the option of where to restore the backup to, the only place it would allow me to select was my backup drive. And when I selected it, it gave me an error message that I couldn¿t restore to the same drive my backup was on. Well Duh! I still haven¿t figured out how to store the data, so I can retrieve it on an image basis. I assume if my PC is working OK, I can go in and retrieve specific files I might have lost, but I haven¿t tried that yet. I¿m guessing I somehow set my backup parameters wrong, but I¿m just guessing. I don¿t know why it refused to list the HD as a place to restore the backed up files. I¿m sure if I print out the manual and read it cover to cover, I can get this all figured out.
Their user¿s manual is very large and very well written. I haven¿t read it yet in full, but I have had to reference it several times because I don¿t find the software very intuitive. My opinion is, if you buy this software you MUST be ready to read the manual.
I¿ve used the manual to figure out how to do incremental or differential backups. The manual is detailed and clear.
By the way, in the end I got my PC working by going in via safe mode and uninstalling some software that had been updated by their automatic update process. I didn¿t know you could uninstall software via safe mode, but now I do.