suggestions for a potential user

We are about your size. We have installed Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Workstation (the standalone version, not the "Advanced" version) on our workstations (mostly ThinkPads), and overnight Monday-Friday we back up certain files and folders to a central location on the network. Over the weekend, a full image backup of each workstation is created in a central location. A full image backup of the server is created every night, using ABR 11 Server.

This gives us the ability to recover files that are created during the week, and in the event that a workstation should fail completely we can restore its image (less than 7 days old) to a new workstation (we keep spares for this contingency). If the server should fail, we have an image that is less than 24 hours old. In addition, all server storage and our central backup storage is mirrored (Raid 0) so we have some redundancy there too.

The Acronis server image and the workstation file/folder backups (but not the workstation images) are further copied to tape using a 20 tape rotation scheme, with certain tapes being sent to an off-premises location in another state. We use Backup Exec for tape operations, not Acronis.

Finally, and most important: we test our backups on a regular schedule.

Hope this is helpful.

Thank you Thomas, you are very kind.
So I should have to buy a license of ABR 11 for each workstation and a license of ABR server. Right?
Do you know something about the possibility of creating an image of the virtual server? With ABR server, I mean.
Last questions:
how do u test the backups? In which hardware?
Is it possible to restore also in a different hardware?
Have you ever found any problems in restore?
How long is the backup procedure (about for each backupped Gigabyte)?
Thank you, bye,
Gianluca