I surely have respect for the problem of making a backup securely while the system is running, but this is of course something that all backup vendors have had to do regardless of their featureset. Or they could just use the inbuilt service from Microsoft and be done ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy , right?). It should be a solved problem by now.

But there is no excuse in having a poor UI or neglecting important aspects of backups. I've always have had the feeling that "no one that developed this tool has ever used it for themselves for other than testing purposes". None of them I've tried have the option of deleting backups that are old automatically and everyone that has ever used a backup program will think of this when, after a year, their backups are getting somewhat big. It's so obvious it hurts my soul, and I'm about to trust them with my data? And perhaps even pay them to handle my data?

Just compare with all the numerous rsync scripts people do. Automatic deletion is among the first features you implement. And that isn't a weekend project, that is a coffee-break project.

In Microsofts backup tool you can get a list of old backups in order to delete one if you like, the list in which they list your backups isn't even sorted - not by date or size, just random (with no way to sort it). They have put no effort in it at all (I first thought that the backups for a few months was missing), the attention to detail (in all the software I've tried) is just nonexistent.

The issue with big backups isn't that these people aren't using their own software, it's that they are big companies who consider disk space to be essentially free.

Why would you delete possibly old data if you are so rich the price of keeping infinite amounts of data doesn't even register? (or is less than the cost of losing data)

I don't completely agree, but I work in storage so I'm also a bit biased.

First of all, even though the disk prices may be getting lower and lower, the amount of data being backed up is growing (almost?) exponentially. This not only requires a lot of space, it's also getting more difficult to back up in a certain amount of time (you probably want your full backups to finish before starting incrementals). There are various workarounds for these issues (compression, snapshots, deduplication etc.), but none of them have really solved them yet.

Secondly, the disks used for backups are usually part of disk arrays and those are quite expensive and also require some administration.

Thirdly, disks are only one part of the story - tapes are not dead yet and probably won't be for a while. They are usually faster than disks (when streaming speed is achieved), cheaper per TB of storage, can be stored more efficiently etc. There are drawbacks of course, so bigger companies usually create multi-tiered backup systems combining all available solutions.

As for the deletion of old data - some data has to be archived/available for a long time in order to e.g. comply with certain laws, but in general one implements multiple retention policies, depending on the importance of data. Most likely you wouldn't want to store _everything_, not just because of the space needed, but also because you need to somehow catalog what is being backed up and this also requires substantial resources.

Yet all backup software I've mentioned target home users and small companies. By using it themselves I meant that the developers would actually use it on their machines at home.

Acronis etc. might be large enough that feedback from such testing isn't of interest, but if that's the case that's just sad.