Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First let me qualify my remarks with my career history. I have well over 20 years in IT, many of which were spent in the area of "operations" and "system administration", both of which include dealing with system backups as a primary component of the job function. So I've been dealing with backups for a while and have a pretty good idea what they should do and how they should do it. To be fair, I'll also point out that my system isn't "standard". I have several different RAID arrays, and back up to an eSATA external hard drive. So this isn't your typical one-drive PC. But the OS deals with all of that just fine, as do all my applications - so a backup program shouldn't care either. I have been looking for a reliable feature-rich backup utility to replace the bare bones backup utility that comes with Windows. I thought I had found it in Acronis Home 2011/2010. It looks good, the feature set is good, and when it works, it is much faster than the Windows backup. I started with the trial version of Acronis Home 2010. After several tries of various types of backups, I finally got one to run correctly. Each attempt resulted in some new kind of error message. And even when I did get one that appeared to be "valid", it reported as "corrupt" when I tried to browse the backup contents. I then saw the 2011 product had been released. With about a week left in my trial period, I upgraded to that. I gave the whole thing one last ditch effort by trying the Non Stop Backup feature. It sounded great ... just like Apple's Time Machine. There's just a little difference ... Apple's program actually works. Just like with the other types of backups I tried, it appeared to work once, and failed every time after that. It got to the point where I couldn't even "edit backup properties" without generating an obscure error of "an error has occurred" or something equivalent. The very worst part of all this is that I tried to open a support case to resolve the issues. Hey, maybe I was doing something wrong and they could point me in the right direction. So, having worked in IT for so long, I realize the importance of logging a fully detailed trouble ticket ... it makes the support person's job so much easier. So I jumped through hoops to gather detailed information, take screen shots, and carefully note each error in my report submission. TWO DAYS later, someone emailed me and informed me they would "take full ownership of my issue and would make sure it was completely resolved to my satisfaction". They then went on to ask questions which indicated they hadn't even looked at my carefully submitted problem report. They even referred to the wrong product name. I wrote back within a couple hours and supplied (again) the information they had apparently missed in my report. That was three days ago. OK, to be fair, there was a holiday in between, so it was 2 full business days ago. And this is PRE-SALES. In my experience, if a company won't even provide quick support to someone about to purchase, but having problems with, their product, chances are they will pay even less attention once they have your money. I have removed the Acronis software from my computer and will purchase a competitor's product. I simply don't have time to waste on flashy software that doesn't work ... ESPECIALLY when its function is "disaster recovery". It has to work, and it has to work right ... Maybe YMMV but I personally would definitely not recommend this software.