Agree on most points. Veritas is an expensive waste of time.
One of the things that makes Acronis True Image worthwhile is its ability to mount an image as a drive. Has a decent scheduling engine, too. It's also handy tobe able to boot from an Acronis-built CD and pull an image across a network. This program has been a real life-saver.
The old NTbackup program that ships with XP isn't bad, but it's not as effective a bare metal restoration tool, IMHO.
NTbackup has the advantage that it works, it's free, It only requires the original Windows CD.
Other than that I would assume that other programs might have advantages. The reason Veritas failed is that the CD it made wouldn't boot on the server, and the backup tape couldn't be used any other way.
This is very odd, because the CD would boot on workstation PCs.
The company survived because it had an alternate backup of the SQL database, and because email and documents were synchronized on the workstations. But the Veritas backup was trash.
Now, all backups go to an external hard drive, one of several that are rotated off site.