I've been shopping for Acronis and reading a mixed bag of reviews for 2015. Is 2015 as good as 2014? I am guessing that people having problems with Acronis 2015 are actually having hardware problems like some do trying to run new Sonaar on XP or an older machine. IDK.
My needs are to clone two 2TB drives and one 500GB drive. I'm not certain about the cloning drive, will I be just as well with a 4TB drive and partitions or should I get duplicate size drives of the ones I am cloning?
Will ATI partition a larger drive for me or do I use Windows to do that?
The computer is running Windows 8.1
 
I'm buying a USB 3.0 drive dock and a SATA drive or drives.
 
Would you advise one large drive with partitions for drive clones or three drives the same size as the ones I am cloning?
 
I've probably asked this and had it answered but these days my "forgetter" seems to work better than my "rememberer".
Thank you,
Julien
 
 

Bump up the backup!!
 
(I currently use Acronis 2013 and never had any issues (it automatically backs up once a month)......not sure how good 2014 & 2015 are).

I used to use Acronis and recommended it to the PC clients I support.  However, I had two occasions to backup that Acronis failed.  There are similar reports about Acronis on the Windows 7 forum.  Acronis didn't get a third chance, I have dumped Acronis and now use Macrium Reflect (paid version). 
 
An application difference.  With Acronis, creating a WinPE bootable rescue disc was mostly a manual procedure.  With Macrium Reflect it is automated and the Macrium application to create the WinPE bootable disc is a breeze.   That was another problem that may not have been Acronis' fault but I tried to do a restore using the Linux version rescue disc and Acronis couldn't find the drive I wanted to restore to, but the WinPE version did.
 

I use 2014 on one computer and 2015 on three computers.
I run a nightly 3 version revolving backup and have the backup verified once done.
Never had a problem with either vesion and Acronis has definitely saved my butt many times!

Last day of sale.

Hmmmm. I use Acronis 2013. TBH I have not had to restore yet (maybe because I actually do backups? ).
 
I should test that.

I've used Acronis since probably 2008 or earlier. Some releases were troublesome, but fixes eventually appeared.
I find ATI 2015 to be a big improvement and simplification. The PE boot creation is now completely automated, like Macrium. I recommend either tool, but I prefer Acronis because I know it better.
 
I also use Retrospect for incremental file backup (nightly), but use Acronis for monthly images (or more frequent) especially before Patch Tuesdays.
 
I keep the system C drive minimal and backups with verification take about 20 minutes. Restores are a lot quicker then debugging, so I never hesitate to restore when I encounter some sort of software installation or other problem.
I have yet to find an image restoration problem.
 
I use YUMI 
 
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
 
to make FAT32 boot USB drives with ATI WinPE 2015, Acronis Disk Director WinPE 12, a Linux Mint distro, Hiren's Boot CD, and Kaspersky AV disk images and a few other such tools. You can fit a lot of boot ISOs on even a small Flash drive and they boot quite a bit faster than DVDs. You just have to boot in Legacy mode (if you have a UEFI secure boot BIOS) and make sure the boot prom supports USB. I think all modern BIOS products made in the last few years will do that.
 
Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to make bootable NTFS flash drives or multi-partition flash drives. I prefer NTFS because I like to have encrypted folders on these portable devices for saving passwords, etc. Without the NTFS EFS support I have to use encrypted archives for such stuff.
 
A flash drive is modelled after the floppy paradigm - a removable media. So it does not support multiple partitions. Apparently there is no way to eject multiple partitions at once in Windows. Or maybe there are other reasons for that lack of functionality.
 
There was a protocol called U3 developed at Sandisk for some stuff like that, but it was problematic and is no longer supported.
 
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U3
 
 
 

When you guys are saying "backup" are you talking about a drive clone? I want to have it so that I can just get a new drive if one dies and have everything ready to install on it and be as if it never failed... and I NEED easy. I am a computer user not a builder or programmer in any form or manner, I need a button to click that does everything I need without asking me questions I don't know the answer to... if that exists.
Thanks... I will probably go with Acronis 2015 and if there is anything that I don't completely understand I will ask someone.
 
What about drives? Would it be easier for me to buy one 3G SATA drive or three SATA drives that are the same size and the ones I am cloning/backing up?
 
Thanks again!
J

From what I gather, if you "clone" a drive and it has several partitions, when you clone the "C" drive that is all you get is the "C" drive partition and nothing else.  If you "backup" (Image as Macrium calls it) the entire drive - all partitions - then you have a complete "copy" of the drive.  If the main drive would fail for whatever reason you can "restore" the entire drive using the backed up image.
 
I may be wrong (been wrong before once - LOL) but what I see as how clone works.

I've always used Paragon paid versions with excellent results.
Since last year I've been running a Windows 2011 home server box that does nightly incremental backups apart from images that I've done with Paragon.