OK, I realize that the original question was about Acronis, but I thought I'd try to get a little outside the box and share some related experiences. First, I've been an Acronis user for many years. I've stayed at V9 because it does everything I need and simply works. My desktop is a RAID mirror with a removable drive that I backup to and periodically rotate offsite. For laptops, I backup to a removable drive. I'd highly recommend that at the current low cost of hard drives, get a spare, and use it to verify that a system restore works with whatever disk backup software you are using. Some time ago, I had a laptop stolen from a car, and realized the shortcomings of what I was doing. I was well prepared for drive failure on desktop and laptop, but not much else. The real cost of a failed or stolen system is how long it takes you to get back to previous functionality. Many TA and trading tools require significant configuration with associated registry settings. If you have a failed desktop or laptop, you will have to bring up our image on a replacement. Particularly with laptops, there is a high probability that any replacement will have hardware differences and may not run a backup image, or may take significant time to make it fully functional. So, a techie that I regard highly has been advising me for a couple of years to use virtualized desktops. So, I experimented with VMWare Player (free) and am now a believer. For those not familiar with this, the target system is run in a "virtual machine" with a dedicated hard drive image. Depending on whose stat's you trust, this exacts a 10-15% speed penalty. Who cares ? The pluses far outweigh any minuses (reduced video performance for games, etc.). That image can be moved to any different machine that acts as a host and you can be back up inside of 1 hour. As an additional benefit, if you travel, your home desktop and travel laptop can now have the same TA and trading environment by moving the virtualized image. If speed to recover from a system failure is a concern, this is definitely worthy of consideration.
I have two internal HDDs in hot swap trays and an external usb HDD I keep offsite. The second tray is normaly turned off to keep the wear and tear to a minimum. I can boot with both of'em turned on just fine, Win 7 seems to pick the right one to boot from every time . Casper takes about 2 min to update my clone, no messing with incremental or what have you. In case the HDD dies or a virus, software glitch etc, I just turn the first HDD off and boot from the second. Takes about a minute and I am back in business.
Casper 7.0 seems to be what I'm going to go with. It appears you can make a duplicate of the OS drive and remove it. I already have a RAID array for data drives. The duplicate of the OS drive will allow me make incremental shells which will get me back up and going in about a minute if the OS drive gets trashed. http://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/productmatrix.aspx