I've been procrastinating on installing backup software. I finally installed Acronis 2016 .
 
I haven't used Acronis in awhile. In the past Acronis always asked me which drive I wanted to back up. This time around it gave me the option to back up "entire PC".
 
Is it really this easy? Three hard drives all backed up at once? Or is it only backing up my C drive? This seems like one of those "too good to be true" things.

Yes, when it says "entire PC" it mean all the drives on your PC.  Of course, the more data you have, the bigger the space required for the resulting image or direct backup.
 
I'm not sure why it would default to that, since I would think most people are backing up their system partition/drive.

It offered me the option to back to to their cloud or my own selected drive. I could have probably told it to look only at  my C drive. I like "Entire PC".
 
This is great! I would be very unhappy if I lost one of my outboard drives. There are tons of sample libraries, plug ins,  Sonar mixes. I like this new setup! 
 
I'm not sure how it rebuilds the data though. My initial backup came in at around 500 gb. Hopefully one day when I loose a drive it will simply boot from the image and tell me " drive E has failed, replace drive to rebuild image". Wouldn't be any easier than that.
 

I use Acronis 2017. I recommend that you create backup profiles for whatever it is you need. 
For example, I have a mirror backup of my C drive's operating system. I then have a backup of "My Documents". 
Then I have a backup of all my song/DAW/project files. 
Each backup goes to an external USB drive and to the Cloud. 
 
You should know what and how your backups are being created and saved. 
Acronis support can help you get setup. 
 

And if you have some spare drives sitting around, I would plug them in place of your real drives and actually test a "live" restore to see if it is usable.  A disaster recovery plan is not a plan until it has been fully tested ...

I tend to have different backup stratagies for different data types, sometimes disc image, sometimes file backups so I do not use the "whole PC option". I also feel (maybe wrongly?) that the bigger the backup file the more likley it will corrupt. For projects and other fast changing data I also mirror on my network drive using synctoy in addition to the Acronis backups.
 
I try to have redundant backups. One to local USB discs and one to a network drive in a different building, the latter is a bit slow but its insurance against theft or other disaster in the studio.
 
Synctoy does not handle my large Kontakt library collection well, its too big, as it represents my biggest investment so I keep a manual mirror of this on the network drive in addition to the Acronis backups.

I agree that many things are static and rarely change, so an occasional manual mirror works, if you can remember to do it.  That applies to sample libraries, Cakewalk Content, and archived installers.  Not to mention that these are usually huge folders and will increase the size and duration of your image file if you choose to image them.
 
I think that the sort of files that are easily accommodated by daily file/folder backups to an external drive or cloud backup service are the project files and/or documents that change frequently.
 
I make two full system drive images each month to a pair of external USB drives that I rotate.  I try to do one before and one after each month's Microsoft updates and the Platinum monthly update.  Built-in rollback that way!  

i usually don't install acronis, instead make a disk and boot from that when i back up, keeps any extra running processes etc out of the picture and don't have to bother disabling them, i rather have nothing not associated with music on my daw pc's. don't need any automatic backup stuff, using ti2017 now, do full backups every time

The Grim
i usually don't install acronis, instead make a disk and boot from that when i back up, keeps any extra running processes etc out of the picture and don't have to bother disabling them, i rather have nothing not associated with music on my daw pc's. don't need any automatic backup stuff, using ti2017 now, do full backups every time

One other advantage to doing it that way is that you will always know that your PC can boot into the recovery boot disk environment if needed to do a restore.  And that your backup drives are accessible in that mode! 

Thanks for these tips. I like the idea of backing up the individual folders that are the most important in addition to  a "master" back up.
 
 I can understand the apprehension in keeping all of those eggs in one basket. I'm considering a dual approach. When I used Acronis in the past, it stored all system backups as separate files. I would go into the backup drive and remove the older ones to make room for the more recent. Not sure if the 2016 version makes additions or writes entire new files each time.  If Acronis  only updates an existing image I see this as being more efficient.
 
I would like to make copies of the main files in an un imaged format so that I could simply save them to new drives if replacing a computer.