It just keeps getting to be more fun

I just want full backup, differential or incremental (whatever) that simply keeps recycling the available disk space. The objective is to always have a disk that I can use to rebuild a system. I am still seriously confused as to what Acronis mechanism will actually do that. Does it have to be a full sector backup; in which case I should just periodically use an app to clone all my disk drives. This, of course, at least doubles the amount of disk space I have to have on my machine. It would seem maybe a sector backup for the boot drive and something else for the rest but I just can't figure out from the documentation and the UI what I really need to do. It does not appear that can be done with one backup program/script or whatever Acronis calls it. Even though if you read what they say, there is an app for that. And it is not clear that this thing is smart enough not to have to store unused sectors. Really non-useful. I checked with my friend at NASA. He was very clear that this was not rocket science. Oh, now that I think about it, a long time ago I designed an experiment for a space probe. So that was not really a point I guess.

I have tried three times with no success. It just breaks when it keeps going until the disk is full.

Now, you have this. Full disk, no current backup. And you may or may not notice that this is happening. So you want to start over. Consolidate does not let you select a new full or none at all. If you pick the old full it fails for no space after half an hour or so of thinking it over.

So you try deleting the backups through Acronis. Well that also destroys the backup script you made to do the backup and you have to start from scratch. What on earth are the developers taking for recreational drugs.

And why does this pig not calculate required space estimates instead of time (which does not have a real tight relationship with reality anyway from what I have seen)? And then look at available space before doing anything. Other backup software I have used seems to have grasped this; and been able to do it.

Oh, and to reiterate another post, when running, the backups usually make the machine unusable for anything else even if specifying the lowest priority in Acronis (8 effective cores, 3 GHz, 8 GB RAM).

I am back to trying to find an understandable RELIABLE backup system. I bought this (2011) based on online reviews/comparisons from older versions. Unfortunately I just did not see those from the last couple of years. My mistake.

Reading through all the posts about "when it fails to do anything useful and you are left without a system" and the undocumented convoluted solutions you had to have done BEFORE the system fails; Grrrr.