Andrew, welcome to these user forums.

You raise several different issues / questions in your post above.

First, the version(s) of Acronis True Image offered with hardware products from companies like WD, Seagate, Crucial etc are typically older versions and are classified as being OEM.  As such they are supported by the companies that provide them and may be limited to work only with the individual companies products etc.

The full version of Acronis True Image, in particular, ATIH 2017, the latest product, is fully supported by Acronis and comes with a full year of support.

ATIH 2017 is fully capable of creating backup tasks that do not need to be scheduled, but can be run on demand, or you can schedule to run at the specific interval that you wish to use, such as quarterly.  You can also create backup tasks to make incremental or differential backups - this can be of whole disks & partitions, or of Files & folders, and write these backups to a variety of different target destinations, including external drives, NAS drives or to the Acronis Cloud (if a cloud subscription is purchased).

One word of caution, Acronis offers two different types of product license - one is for a perpetual license where you purchase the product once and can use it forever, - the second is a subscription license where you license the product to use only for the subscription period, where this is accompanied by an agreed amount of Cloud storage space.  With the latter if you don't renew the subscription then you lose access to the cloud storage after 30-day and can only use the software application for recovery of any local backups created prior to ending the subscription.

As to progress of backups, you will see information about estimated time remaining etc, but should take this with a pinch of salt at times, as may sit showing x minutes remaining for an extended period, depending on other aspect of the system backup process, including Microsoft VSS being used for creating snapshots of system data etc.

If you install Acronis in Windows, it is integrated into the OS and does run background services which are set by default.  You can manually kill the services (most of which aren't needed for what you want to do anyway - attached are some scripts you can save the .txt  as .bat files and run with an admin account to make starting and stopping services easier if you plan to switch these off and on regularly.  Use :: to comment out a line if you want or remove :: to activate that line again.   

Regardless whether you kill the background services or not, no, you DO NOT have to create a backup schedule, nor do you need to create a cleanup schedule.  Just set the shedule tab to "do not schedule" and then you can go in and manually kick off the backup whenever you want by opening the application, finding your backup task and clicking on the "backup now" button.  

Alternatively, you can use the offline rescue media and take offline images as you need them, but you will have to step through a few settings each time such as picking the source and destination.  If this is quarterly, or monthly, or even weekly, it's not that bad unless you have a lot of settings to configure each backup.  I take offine backups to a drive that is only connected for offline backups, to avoid ransomware or malware from getting a chance to jump onto this backup drive (just in case).

As for the Cloud priciing, there are different options.  There is a cloud subscription which gives you phone support and free major version upgrades as they are released (annually), but it's entirely subscription based so if you don't renew, you can't make new backups and can only recover.  There's the stand-a-lone (perpetual) version which gives you phone and chat support, but no free major version upgades.  You can also purchase cloud storage with your perpetual license.  Probably best to contact technical support for any pricing/purchasing questions with your specific questions to make sure you get what you're looking for. 

56697: Acronis True Image 2016: Services and Processes - they haven't released the KB for 2017 serv ices yet

Contact technical support

Forgot the scripts...

Welcome to the world of Acronis. Norton really messed up Ghost (although strictly the later version were not based on the DOS Ghost program but the later acquistion of Powerquest). For several years I used ATI on some systems and Ghost on others. For the last 4 years I only use ATI.

As noted in earlier responses, scheduling is optional. I have scheduled backups and ones that I only run manually (usually before major Windows update or installing new generation of ATI).

Ian