I'm also an Acronis TI user, and it has saved the day for me a couple times in the past, though I don't know how much that really puts it to the test. I rely on its image backups for a few different computers -- which I really ought to do more like every couple weeks, rather than the 2 - 3 month intervals I seem to manage -- and just hope for the best.
It is true that the only *drop-in* replacements (no boot-up / restore process, with images and the software that made them) are full, identical or equivalent duplicate hard drives. I have done this occasionally in the past, and may do it again at some point, but
it's clearly more of a big deal to do this, with associated negatives and limitations. Not just needing a bunch of extra HDDs, which is not cost-prohibitive to the degree it once was, but that the work involved is much more, and then the job is only good for a few weeks (at the most) before it would need to be done again. Then, storing some of these off-site is probably also a better disaster procedure -- unless your city is hit by an earthquake, or something. I guess it depends on how vital your backups are.
I facilitated this by standardizing on desktop rigs that had very easily accessible
HDDs and a couple of built-in hard drive controllers, plus e-SATA ports as an alternate method, providing additional ways of temporarily hooking up an external drive for direct cloning. USB-3 has largely replaced e-SATA on newer systems, and should be just as good for this, if not slightly faster; USB-2 is painfully slow. I know someone who favors tower desktop systems with pull-out drive trays. That would make it easy, too. Laptops would probably be the most difficult, for cloning.
But not many will go to this trouble or expense. Conventional
imaging solutions will continue to be the most practical ones, for full boot-drive backups.
Jordan
From: Kari Eveli
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2014 1:34 AM
Subject: Re: Backup--OT
I have used Acronis with success for years despite its somewhat flaky
user interface. Acronis makes a true whole-disk image (sector-by-sector
if needed) that can resized to fit resized partitions.