I am another customer who used Acronis for many years. It certainly was great at the beginning, as anything that could restore one of my computers to a state that was usable without making a service call to a computer tech was amazing. It would work most of the time, but really, back in those days I really was grateful to have a chance at reviving an imaged version of my OS... it was like freakin' magic. As time went on though, as many of you Acronis users of many years such as myself would probably agree - features were added, but strangely, many great features were being removed. Every release I would notice something I had used was missing. Add those factors to the fact that it truly was performing worse (at least in my situations) than it had in the past. Sure it was marginally faster, but it was ridiculous how frequently my images would get corrupted (on different computers, using different software configurations). I just couldn't rely on it anymore.
It was actually over on
Windows 8 Forums where I was constantly reading about the wonderful things users were saying about Macrium. It was a no-brainer. They had a free version that is VERY full-featured
imho. I tried it for maybe a week or two, and it was an absolute delight to use. It was fast, consistent, and their community and company seemed on another level from Acronis. I bought it after a couple of weeks, and that was probably a year and a half ago. I wanted to not be limited to using only the
full backup scheme, which is the way it works with the free version - but should be quite adequate for many people. I haven't looked back. It was slightly more expensive than Acronis (although now Acronis is aggressively cutting prices, it is quite inexpensive)... but if you're like me, a solid backed up OS and/or data hard to put a price on. I honestly have never had any issue with any single backup/restore this entire time with Macrium. It is so fast and absolutely reliable.
I've read recently in some reviews that NovaBackup seems to be the up-and-comer, and that Macrium's compression rate is only average. I wouldn't know how it compares, as I haven't used anything else in ages but my backups are certainly not nearly the gargantuan sizes Acronis used to create for me. In fact my incremental and differential backups complete so quickly and are a so tiny at times it amazes me.
So thanks for everyone on these forums for pointing me in the right direction... to Macrium Reflect.