Does Acronis even support it's products?

It is usually between 2 to 4 weeks that you get a response if you get one at all.

Hello Gene and DwnNDrty,

We are really sorry for the delay with the response to your cases. We'll do our best to prevent such situation from happening in the future. Once again, please accept our profound apologies for the difficulties you've experienced.

I have contacted the responsible manager and your cases will be handled as soon as possible.

Please let me know if you need any further assistance from my side.

Thank you.

Another week has gone by and still no response to my support cases which means I still can't do backups! :(

What's going to happen is that I'm going to give up on Acronis, demand a refund, and go somewhere else.

I work in the software industry as a developer. We and most of our customers have little difficulty responding to support requests within a business day, two at the very most if we're swamped. To me two weeks with no response is just totally unacceptable.

Considering the lack of timely support and the apparently poor quality of their software (based on sheer number of reported problems) I am actually surprised Acronis continues to stay in business.

The progress indicator in Acronis True Image was broken in 2009 and remains so in their 2010 version. It was broken under XP Pro, Vista Pro 64 bit and is still broken under Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit. As far as I can tell it has been broken for well over 2 years looking thru the postings and Knowledge Base. I suspect they don't know how to fix it and that is why they continue to make the same stupid recommendation - if the job completes okay ignore it. Well they are ignoring the fact that we NEED to know if the job has started and gone beyond initialization and where in the overall time/size the job stands Otherwise who knows WHAT is going on? I suggest we get this out all over Facebook & Twitter and see if that gets their attention. Obviously all the users suffering with this major defect are being ignored.

I finally gave up and started looking for an alternative to True Image. Unfortunately I discovered that almost no one supports Iomega's REV drives except Iomega.

I don't like running without a backup so I decided to change my backup media to one that is more universally supported. External USB hard drives. So I picked up a 1 TB Seagate Freeagent Go.

It works so well that I pulled the REV drive out of my system and sold it after sanitizing the cartriges.

So for me this issue was resolved by abandoning the REV drive for a USB hard drive.

FWIW: Imation has their Odyssey drives which is essentially the same thing as an external USB hard drive.

Hello Gene,

I will do everything possible in order to resolve the issue you experience. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience you experienced because of such big delay with the response.

When you get the message asking you to insert next volume, click OK. Since this requires user interaction, you will not be able to run unattended scheduled backup to Iomega REV drive.

This is an issue in the product, our development team is already aware of it and the fix will be available in a future build of Acronis True Image Home 2010.

Let me know if you need further assistance.

Thank you.

I also am having problems with the extremly slow response to a support request. I went nearly two weeks to get one and it did not work. I replied to the reply with additional questions and got nearly the exact same reply. I checked this forum and found that others that have the problem of the Task Scheduler in ATI failing tasks and the solutions offered are not working either. Manual backups work just fine.
I won't be wasting my money on this product any more!

Thats' where I'm getting to James. I've paid for the last two versions of Acronis, but once they bring out a new version they refuse to support older versions. This is pretty poor when the only difference (from my point of view) is that I have to learn a new user interface and the bits that don't work properly still don't work properly but with different colours.

Side issue - is Acronis 10 just a lot slower than 11?

Hello all,

We are terribly sorry for the difficulties you've experienced.

James, could you please clarify what happened when you've tried to update Acronis Scheduler?

Lee, I've passed your suggestions about GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the appropriate department. Additionally, what do you mean by 'slower': user interface or backup/restore operations?

We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

It's the backups which seem slow. The most annoying thing is that the "time remaining" is a work of complete fiction. I set a backup running yesterday - it teold me 25 mins. I came back 30 mins later to pack my PC up and get in the car only to find that there were 1 hours 40 mins remaining. I wouldn't have started the backup if I'd known that it wouldn't finish before I have to get on the road. It would be less annoying to have nothing at all. Obviously the preferable thing is to fix it. How hard can it be?

Finally - how's this for a con-trick. Sell someone some software. Get them to try an upgrade for nothing, but don't tell them that the files created with the new software are not compatible with the old version so once they've tried the new version they almost 100% have to buy it. This is shocking, but be aware that Acronis Home 10 .tibs are not readable by previous versions of Acronis Home. So once you've tried the trial if you want to roll back then you have to create a full system backup because incrementals created with Acronis 10 "are not valid backups".

Not much to tell. It appears to work normally(?) but scheduled tasks still give errors 'every' time. I even get the same errors when tasks are deleted.

James - have a look for this thread:

6778: cant do back up

[Sorry - not bright enough to link to it]

I too get errors reported on scheduled tasks, but the backups seem to work OK. I've managed to recover a full disc backup from a full plus about 15 incrementals. All the incrementals ended with errors in the log and the calendar showed them red. However - they seem to work. Like I say in the other post - it leaves me a bit nervous - especially since I won't know if a real error occurs.

Lee, the link is http://forum.acronis.com/forum/6778

Being bright enough isn't something I ever consider of anyone, you might simply not be sure of what to do so don't worry about it please. You are bright enough to post and have the confidence to do that. To include a link you can go to the page you want to refer to, right click in the address bar of explorer or firefox or whatever your browser is, click on copy, and then within your reponse just right click and paste directly into your response wherever you like. Just try it and if it comes out wrong then everyone will understand - blimey, I have made some howlers of mistakes but what the heck, go for it.

I would like to help regarding your issues with backups - it appears you like to do many incrementals but that is not a good backup strategy. Also, you will not find any software that provides backward compatibility as a rule. The reason being that anything new is not known about in advance of course.

Thanks Bin.

I do incrementals because full backup takes too long. I backup to NAS and even when connected by cable it takes Acronis anything from 11 to 18 hours to do a full disk backup of my 220GB laptop drive (hence comment about backups being slow somewhere else on these forums). The 8GB incremental this morning took 44 minutes (to NAS on wireless (130MBps) - wireless slows it down a bit I guess cos of QoS while I'm browsing the papers).

When I have th luxury of a long weekend with no work then I steel myself for life without the PC and do a full, but otherwise there literally aren't enough hours in the day to run a decent backup strategy.

Hi Lee.

I see your point - sometimes it seems that all the PC ever does is back up and we never have the time to actually do anything !!

The strategy that I have is to use partitions. The system partition has none of my own data files in it so to make full system backups doesn't take very long (its about 15GB at the moment). I have a 'Data' Partiton which contains most of the everyday dynamic types of things such as the documents and settings folders, emails..... and this is only a few Gig, so that can be backed up fully each time too.

The other partitons are mainly static, such as music and photos. I treat these more as archives and I don't need to back them up very often. They do get added to of course so I do use differential backups for those but not so regularly. For instance, all photo folders for 2005 thru 2009 originals will never change so they are simply archived in different formats and places.

So really all of my strategy is based upon splitting up static and dynamic data and therefore minimizing the amount of data that needs to be backed up.

Lee,

I'm not trying to put you down or anything like that but new files not being able to be read by an older version of some software is pretty common. I can't open my newer Quicken files with an older version of the program. I am in the world of engineering and our CAD program, until recently, could not open newer files with our older version. It can be done now but it's still with a lot of limitations.

Steve - understood - you're right, but it would have been nice to have been told.

Bin - my strategy of backing up the whole disc is based on my HDD crashing a couple of years ago. The Phoenix recovery system recovered the OS OK and I'd been doing simple copies to USB drive of my data and mail file. Photos etc are archived all over the place. The thing which drove me to Acronis was that after the crash it took a couple of days to get my PC back to working order - i.e. finding the install files and passwords for half a dozen apps that I use.

However, I like you idea of a separate partition for media which can be backed up less frequently. I'm not a PC expert - is there software you recommend for partitioning or should I just google it?

Yes Lee, I recommend Disk Director Suite - the first Acronis product that I bought. There is a completely new version of DD under development so you may want to wait for that. The current DD10 is not compatible with Win7. There is not a release date for DD11 as yet. I suggest you have a look at the main product page www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/ and a look at the Disk Director Forum. You could post a topic in that forum if you have any questions.