Many buy software to backup their HDD but are afraid to complete an actual Restore function. The Full image backup of partitions of a HDD if completed properly, and verified, has little chance to fail upon doing a restore. You simply accept to: 1. erase partitions on the destination drive, and 2. book the restore with partitions and it works. Under Windows (instead of a Rescue CD or BartPE CD), once the Restore has been booked, Acronis will advise that the system will Restart. You then see the Acronis splash (top left) and the Restore starts. Once completed, Windows starts up. This is the second successful Restore I do with ATI 10 and will never hesitate to do another if I have reasons to do so.
Congratulations. I was lucky enough to not know what I was doing when I started with Acronis 6. I didn't know enough to worry that anything might go wrong. Soon after I had confirmed that Acronis worked I stopped verifying. Versions 7, 8, 9, 9.1 and now 10 have always worked for me - doing full imaging only. I have no time for secure zones, differential, incremental, data........ just make and restore full images and nothing ever goes wrong. To make an image and not to restore it is crazy - its the only way you know if it is really going to work. If it fails then you restore an earlier one. If that fails you restoore an even earlier one. Apart from the emergency reasons for restoring I find that I'm often tempted to try a new program. 5 or 6 minutes to make an image. 30 minutes to try the new program and 8 06 9 minutes to restore the old system.
Although I use ATI 9.1 (corp ed.), I can add that I have restored my desktop and laptop numerous times and have never experienced any ATI-rooted problems. However, when I used to restore images created with Rollback Rx installed I did have to do a FIXMBR after restoring. Therefore, I now find it 'cleaner' to uninstall Rollback before imaging, which also allows me to take that opportunity to do a complete defrag of my C-drive. I then reinstall Rollback after restoring the image. While there are a great many restore problems reported in Wilders' ATI forum, the majority of them are often traced back to Linux driver issues, user mistakes, or attempting to restore an image that was created on one PC to another PC. ~pv
I can't remember how many times i've restored my system using ATI 9 and now ATI 10. The only way i backup and restore images is by bootining into the recovery environment using either a CD or USB pen drive, i also only ever create full backup archives on an internal HDD, when the backup image has been created and varified i restore the image to the same drive that was backed up, if the restore is successful i then delete all my old backup archives apart from the last good image and the newly created and tested good image.