I switched from Ghost to Acronis because of the recommendations here.

With Ghost, I was able to do a monthly full backup and weekly incremental backups in the same directory. Ghost was smart enough to name the backup files properly so that it all could co-exist in the same directory.

With Acronis, I had to create a pre-backup script to move off the old full backup and weekly incrementals into a subdir (named by date) before the new full backup is taken, or the new full backup would fail. At least it had that option to allow you to do that.

Why don't you like the incremental backups in Acronis?

Here's some other minor issues I've had with Acronis.

- Don't install Seagates Disc Wizard if you have Acronis. First, it's a subset of the Acronis product, so you don't need it. Secondly, I ended up having to re-install Acronis because it lost it's serial number after I installed Seagate's Disc Wizard. Acronis makes it fairly easy to recover your serial number through their web site if you haven't recorded it somewhere. My guess is that installing Disc Wizard must have wiped out some registry info, but I didn't look into it enough to figure out what they had done. I just removed everything and re-installed it.

- If you try to clone a disk with no partition table on it, Acronis will fail with no decent error message after it reboots as part of the cloning process. Workaround was to create a label and a filesystem on the target disk, and let Acronis overwrite it as part of the process. The error was something like "disk not found". You would think that they might recognize that as a problem before the reboot, but they didn't. In my case, the source disk was the internal drive on my notebook and the target disk was in a USB enclosure. Same exact disk models. (This problem is why I tried Seagate's Disc Wizard, before I knew it was a subset of the Acronis product.)

- Also related to this same issue, at some point my backup drive got renumbered from G to E, and I didn't realize that my incremental backups were failing until I actually happened to check the backup dir on the backup drive. I guess it's a good idea to permanently assign a drive letter to your backup drive, which is what I ended up doing. (More an issue that I created, but I was surprised I didn't get some sort of alert when the weekly incremental backup failed. There was certainly an error message displayed when I manually opened the application, but when you expect everything to just work in the background, you don't need to open the application unless you want to change something.)

Overall, I think it's a decent product, but it does have a few quirks. Nothing huge though, as I was able to work around all of them. I think Ghost was also a decent product, but it seems like a lot of people dislike most Norton/Symantec products these days. (Probably because their consumer A/V products have deteriorated to the point of being bloatware, I suppose.)

-David