After using horrible ATI software which was bundled with my new Toshiba hard drive which I purchased because the software that came with my old WD hard drive ran the WD drive into the ground this Acronis backup program works like a dream. The software boots up 10x faster, incremental backups are quick, and it compresses the data so it uses 1/4 as much drive space.

Works very well to clone one drive to another

I have used Acronis backup before; the last version was 2014, which worked great. I had hoped that this version would be as good. However, Acronis has decided that the ONLY method for performing backups will be to use a Cloud service. Such as their Cloud service, which you can pay additional money for. It no longer supports backups to DVDs, or in my case, Blue-Ray disks. I like Blue-Ray backup because it doesn't take a lot of disks and I control the location of the backup. Sensitive files can go in my safe. But, although this advertises it will work with external drives, the fact is that it does not. Moreover, when I contacted their rather mediocre technical support, they pretty much admitted it. Their suggestion was to back up my hard drive to my hard drive and then manually copy to the Blue-Ray disk. Or, I could backup to their Cloud service and then manually copy to my Blue-Ray. Then, to recover files, I would perform the process in reverse: copy from my Blue-Ray to their Cloud and restore from the Cloud.

The second concern is that this is an incredibly intrusive program. When running Task Manager, I found no less than 6 background processes running all the time for Acronis. I do not know what they are all doing, but they seem to be communicating over my WiFi. Moreover, there are some that show up in my TaskBar. And, they cannot be removed from the TaskBar.

What I wanted was a simple backup system. I run it. It compresses and writes files to my Blue-Ray, and then it goes away. This is something else entirely. Unfortunately, Acronis has ruined what had been a reasonable product.

UPDATE: I spoke to Acronis customer support. They allowed me to "downgrade" to True Image 2014. That version does just what I want it to, and has much less "intrusiveness". (The Task Bar item is gone, for example.) It still has a couple of background processes, but these allow full cloning of your hard drive. Moreover, now id does backup to a DVD / Blue-Ray. So, I have upgraded my assessment to 4 stars.

Works as advertised. Acronis is a good solution for generating scheduled image backups.
My main complaint is that if loses it's schedule sometimes
It also couldn't handle a mirrored boot drive

Been using Acronis since 2010. Would use nothing else.