Backup software

[johnridley]

Anyone using Acronis True Image? I've been using CrashPlan with a private server, but it doesn't do full system backup. Thinking about buying a 3 machine license for True Image ($80 right now). On paper it looks great, it seems to do everything that any other backup system I've ever seen, including Apple Time Machine, does, then some. Unless someone has huge warnings about it, I'll probably give the 30 day trial a try.
The reviews are good. As expected, there are really only two contenders, this and Norton Ghost, and as I would expect, the Norton offering sucks. Does anything from Norton not suck these days? They must have a vice president in charge of making sure they don't do more than barely enough.
At home I'd have it create backups to the NAS box. For the kid's laptop at college, an external hard drive.

• Marinna Martini - I think our IT folks use it.
  
• John Ridley - If not, what do people use for backup? The thing I like about True Image is that it just sits there and makes incremental backups every 5 minutes. You can then go and either grab individual files or do a full system restore from a blank drive at absolutely any point in time.
  
  Honestly, for the cost of hard drives these days, I think it's probably worth it to just toss in another hard drive and run this. It's a better solution than RAID mirroring since it guards against doing something stupid like deleting files or visiting malware sites. A 1TB drive and this software would be < $100, which obviously pays for itself the first time you have malware/virus/bad driver/stupid software to clean up.
  
  Also it apparently has a quick way to say "I'm about to try something potentially harmful (driver install, visiting dodgy site, clicking on an unknown EXE), bookmark the current status" then later "that was a bad idea, revert me to that bookmark."
  
  And it can install as a boot manager so even if you bone your system into non-bootable status, you can press F11 during boot and restore to a previous point.