I know that there are several people on here that use this and just received a mail about the new version...

Upgrade for £23.95 (non upgrade cost of £39.95)

New features listed below, but looks like they are moving closer to drop box in terms of functionality, but the one that made me post was the cloud storage, 250GB for £39.95/year, looking at drop box, they offer 200GB for £199.99, so 16p/MB vs 100p/MB along with a good piece of software!

Perfect sync
We’ve brought sync to near perfection. We took an already amazing technology and made it even better. Share unlimited amounts of information with your friends or between your own devices, and set any folders you want to synchronize – on your computer, phone, tablet, network, USB key or an external drive. True Image 2013 is so much faster and easier to use than ever before.

Mobile file access
Your data is not just protected but is also available anywhere you go. The files you want are now in all your devices, anytime you want them. Just get the FREE app for your smart phone or tablet and you’re in business.

The cloud
Bring your digital world to a whole new space: bring it online! Add 250GB of government-grade AES-256 encrypted cloud storage capacity with True Image online.  £3.95 / month and £39.95 / year

Nonstop backup
True Image 2013 records ongoing changes as you work, so you can revisit any file, folder or your entire system as it was at a specific point in time.

Try&Decide
Avoid disasters before they happen. Try out new software and browse any websites, even if they are potentially dangerous. Try&Decide technology allows you to take a test drive and decide if you want to keep any changes to your computer.

The plus pack gives you some additional imaging features, although that's at extra cost, which is a shame really as they should include it as part of the package, don't forget Acronis also does many other things I've listed in terms of standard backups, I've just listed the new features.

When you say cheaper alternatives, do you mean non cloud? Or if you mean cloud, what alternatives do you mean? Obviously their cloud would be in addition to the local backup.

I'm looking in to cloud based services as at the moment I have a very good local backup policy, with a server running RAID mirroring what's on my laptop, but if my house goes up in flames I lose everything from the last 10 years 

It's going to take an age to upload it all, but once it's there I only need to copy over the new stuff.

I'm looking at about 180GB to backup at present, so I think the web host may call in some fair use policies

Bitcasa's still in Beta and says it will be free while in Beta, I might give the Acronis 1 month free trial a go and see how it works and if it'll take a month to upload it all

17days if I can maintain an upload of 1 meg, by the looks of it