FYI: Don't count on Acronis TrueImage 9 to recover from DVD. I've been round and round with Acronis technical support for over a month. They had me jump through hoop after hoop (implying it was my fault). Finally, they said "here's an update". It still didn't work. And since 30 days had passed while fighting the program my vendor wouldn't offer a refund. I asked Acronis for a refund, explaining the 30 day problem. Their response, and I quote: "I'm afraid we can not refund you, we do not responsible for retail outlets." Obviously not responsible for their software either. Caveat emptor.
my laptop has two user bays, one holds a CD/DVD and the other a second HD (you can also use an USB HD) I noticed this problem too with DVD. Since then I use two mehtods to backup: Acronis and PQDI (the old Pwoer Quest Disk Imager before Norton bought it) and put it to HD as well. I have some bootable mini-CD's for both Acronis and PQDI and can normally recover in that way, even if I loose the whole primary HD. vital analtics
Others have complained about recovering from DVD. Suggest you consider cloning to USB HD instead of imaging to removable optical media. Acronis is good at cloning.
I got some HP (not Japanese brand) CDs and I tried to use Acronis True Image to do a full backup. It fails the entire process once I hit a CD it doesn't like. Now that's annoying. I wasted half a stack of CD while trying this and finally gave up. It sure was nice when it was working. I plan to dump everything to an external HD as my backup.
I have only used Acronis 8 and don't have any experience with version 9. DVD being a very unreliable medium - relatavely speaking - I believe that it defeats the basic idea of backup. Granted, DVD sounds convenient these days but I would never consider this. The bad thing is that you might only find out till such day when you really needed your backup.