I've used Acronis and Norton Ghost for years....
I've learn't to backup my data the hard way. From my Dad!
He once asked me to look at his computer, it had a secondary drive which was running really slow. The PC ran fine if you didn't attempt to access that drive. I pulled it out and began backing up his data.
He'd essentially filled the drive up to within 4 Mb of 60 Gb using an audio recording app for internet radio. He had 10,000+ .doc/ .pdf files in a single folder. I asked " Why not sort them into subfolders? " and he responded " Who has time? "
Anyway, a drive that full doesn't respond well to GUI OS'es. I had to
XCOPY, Del, format for hours.