I'm an I.T. consultant and I also have five Windows PCs at home. Same experience here but I didn't wait until it was an emergency. I did my usual iterations of test restores and found out the "bare metal" (so called, anyway) recovery didn't work. Acronis support and I went back and forth for at least three weeks, then I had to cut them off because they were just wasting my time and we were no closer to resolution than upon first contact. I wasted money on the stoopid product but learned my lesson, ran a full trial of Storagecraft's backup solution, then purchased it. I've had to do many file and full system restores and it works flawlessly. Definitely worth the money, Acronis isn't worth the CD it's distributed on. Bah.