Acronis - yes or no?

First, I would much rather skip this entirely, but as of yet, I've not found a way to convince anyone that backing up workstations is a waste of time and resources, not to mention money. IMO, workstations are disposable. I've found the imaging and deployment tools in Windows to be very productive, and storing all data on a file server with backups on site, off site, and off-line to be my personal preference.

I've been running the evaluation of Acronis Backup Advanced 11.5 for the last week, and while I wasn't impressed with it in Workgroup mode, it seems almost flawless when running in AD. I've configured it to backup 2 workstations, one in a VM (Win7) and another on bare metal (Win8).

I'm preparing to test the restore functionality today. I'm going to restore one full, one differential, and one incremental of each machine. We'll see how...