Acronis True Image 6.0

Here are my reasons (copied from a support forum I posted to):

I consider myself burned because I trusted PC Magazine's high rating of this product too much and have been extremely disappointed as a result. Instead of investing time to find some reasonable open-source alternative or to make sure all the features I expected were present and functional, I just ponied up the $50 (or whatever) to buy TI version 7.0. Mistake, so far.

Here are my complaints:
1. No partial backup/filtering feature. Foolishly, I assumed that the software would give me the flexibility to mark portions of the filesystem to be included in the backup. No dice. I understand that Acronis considers entire-disk backup/cloning/restoration to be their sweet spot, but the lack of this feature makes the software far less attractive to the home user, in my opinion.
2. Massive size of incremental backup images! After an initial full backup that was 13 GB big, I hoped for daily incremental backups that were in the tens of MB range. No! Instead, I get seemingly random sizes anywhere between 100 MB and 1 GB (so far). At first, I thought I could rectify this by taking point 1 above into consideration. So, I moved everything within reason off of my target partition (including, laboriously, Documents and Settings, in an effort to avoid things like my browser caches) and made sure that the partition Windows lives on is no longer included in the backup. The result? Slightly smaller file sizes, but not much. I'm still anywhere between 100 and 500 MB every night. Obviously no good for nightly "incremental" backups.
3. Support. First I was disappointed because the only FAQ or support info Acronis offers is entirely pre-sales focused. Sorry, Acronis, but it's really worthless from a post-sales perspective! The manual is OK, but it's long on peripheral info (do we really need another source of information on disk partition structure?) and short on real rubber-meets-road usage information. To top this off, I formally wrote a support request to Acronis tech support on 6/7 and finally received a reply over one week later. By then, I had already figured out everything except the file size issue, and the answer I received did nothing more than restate the "sectors, not files" point I've already read here a bunch of times. I would suggest a formal KnowledgeBase (an honest Support FAQ instead of a Marketing FAQ) to house some of these more frequent "answers," instead of relying on 1-1 e-mail or this forum.

My situation is simple: I have a large second hard drive and I want nightly incremental backups of my primary drive written there. Surely that is a common need? If I really have 500 MB worth of sector changes happening in one day's time, then I don't think that sector-based incremental backup is a very good approach for the product to take. It's not really very incremental, is it, when the "increments" represent massive chunks of the hard drive?

I made my own bed here by not doing more homework, but I honestly would like to ditch the product and get my money back at this point. I suppose I'll try to call and make this request, but I don't have high expectations. I am 100% confident that there are many other superior choices out there at this time--and probably some of them free to boot.

To demonstrate that I have some sense of balance here, I will say that this is probably a good product for basic users, in the sense that the UI is friendly. However, I would imagine that even basic users would benefit greatly from a filtering feature. And who wouldn't want the smallest files possible when doing incremental backups?

Bad News: Completely hosed my system when it went to make the CD. After that, no files came up in Add/Remove programs. Internet was suddenly read/only. Had to reformat my hard drive / replace my OS. After doing that, we put in CD to restore data and it crashed my system completely. So we had to reformat again. Luckily I had everything backed up by hand on an external hard disk (the point of buying this software in the first place). While it is obviously my configuration or they would be out of business, what a nightmare!

Good News: I had no interest in tech support, just getting my money back. Rarely have I had such a customer-friendly experience of getting a refund.