Disappointed
Need to vent a little here...
Just got LOTS of new storage recently, as I was constantly running out of space (storage and backup). ATI 2012 is out, so I upgraded since I was doing a nice clean install of Windows and all. Shiny new 2 TB drive for backup, more than enough to hold my data thrice over.
Install ATI, all is well. Backup system image. Still good. Turn on nonstop backup for data drive, service stops within a half hour for unknown reason. Now ATI main window refuses to open (even after reboots). Uninstall/reinstall fixes it. Try again. Same. Do some research, discover nonstop is flaky. Great. Also discover a built-in pause feature from system "overload". Wasn't overloading system, but OK...
Start over. System image goes well as always. Try to do nonstop on just my documents (relatively small backup). Service quits after the backup completes. Manually restart in Windows services manager, but nonstop refuses to work nonetheless. Reboot gets me back to ATI refusing to open (crashes with exception). Another uninstall/reinstall. This is getting old.
Abandoning nonstop since it doesn't work. System image went well; first file/folder backup went to 109% (and stayed there a while) before finishing.
I'm running a fully patched Win 7 x64 machine, all my storage drivers are up-to-date (and working quite well), and yet I had to spend several hours just to get my initial backup started. I'm so frustrated with the quality of this software right now it isn't even funny. I ditched Norton Ghost for ATI 2011 because my Ghost wasn't meant for Win7 and I didn't want to pay $50 for an upgrade; instead, I uninstalled it (it worked most of the time) and spent that money on ATI 2011. It was buggy as well, but I chalked it up to leftover Ghost incompatibilities. To find 2012 to be even buggier on a clean install is utterly disappointing.
During each of the six times I installed (or reinstalled) the product, I enabled the feedback mechanism; hopefully Acronis gets the errors my software threw and fixes them.
Thanks for the reply, Colin.
Gave up on NSB... Not using it at the moment.
All backups are being stored on an internal 2 TB drive (most of the reason I got it was due to issues I was having with an external backup drive disconnecting from time to time).
Running Norton Internet Security. Is has live checking, but being one of the more popular (if not most) AV solutions out there, wouldn't ATI have been tested with it? No other background programs at all. Have four total backups scheduled now; three finished, but the fourth shows as not backed up after finishing. Going to start it again. I've turned off NIS' SONAR live protection for now, but am I expected to run without it just to stay backed up?
I gave up on 2011 and 2012 and reverted to 2010.
My complaints.
1) The major reason is that the 2010 Tasks & Logs interface was far superior, in my opinion to the 2011-12 interface, giving me a much better ability to easily oversee all of my scheduled backups with easy access to the backup setups. The new interface was, I believe, bloated and not intuitive. The calendar listing for scheduled backups in 2010 was much easier to understand and did not confuse the day-of-the month with the day-of-the-week making it much easier to see what the actual day/date backups would be run.
2) A minor complaint. 2011-12 persists in trying to run a backup originally mis-scheduled for 7:30 PM, but deleted and replaced with a 7:30 AM backup.
3) I am not positive, but it seems that the logs are stored on a server and not on my local computer. I could be wrong on this, but didn't pursue it as I had already decided to revert to 2010.
I very much liked the email backup feature, but not enough to keep 2011-12 for that reason alone. There are email backups available which should suit my purpose easily.
David Wright Sr.
Unfortunately, I only have 2011 to roll back to; during one of my uninstall/reinstall cycles I actually installed 2011, but found that I couldn't create an Acronis Secure Zone on a GPT drive (of which all my new drives are setup as). I was to use ASZ because then the software will supposedly delete old backups automatically when space is needed for new backups. Since they don't make 8TB drives yet and I don't want to RAID backup drives together, this is a must for me.
As my current issues, ATI once again showed one of my backups as "not backed up" after spending a couple of hours supposedly performing the backup (and the HDD light was lit during that time, so it was doing SOMETHING). I closed ATI and started a support chat. I had to restart it to get the build # and found all but one of my backups were missing. I had favorited my backups so I wouldn't have to look at the Windows XP mode virtual machine ATI insists on showing, so I un-hid the regular backups and there they were, not favorited (even though I never un-favorited them). Additionally, the backup I kept re-trying because it continued to say "not backed up" suddenly shows 4 versions backed up. Unbelievable how buggy this software is.
I'll post more if anything comes of my support chat.
Michael,
Nortons/Symantec does have the unenviable reputation of bossing Windows components about (this is since they introduced COM talking software round about 1999/2000), so it is possible it is clashing, but as you say it along with McAfee is one of the more popular purchased A/V Firewall utilities and although I don't use it, I would be surprised if some of the beta testers didn't have it installed.
I would caution about using the ASZ on your main drive, as if your drive dies all your images die with it. You can set TIH to perform the same sort of function using other drives as the archive storage space, but it requires manually setting all the parameters.
ASZ is on my 2 TB backup drive, not my main drive (main drive is two SSDs in RAID 0, an excellent reason to backup in itself).
After two separate chats w/ tech support, it was finally suggested that I convert my ASZ to NTFS. I didn't even realize it was an option (noticed it converted to FAT when ASZ was activated, but didn't think much of it). Since FAT32 only allows up to 2GB files, it's quite possible that was causing my issues. Notably, nonstop (which caused me the most issues) probably trucked along fine until it tried to save a 2GB+ file (of which I have many -- all my home videos are from a high def camcorder).
I still find ATI to be a bit overly buggy (I often see the progress meter at over 100%, among other things), but I'm hoping the NTFS conversion solves my major issues with the software. I really can't understand why ASZ wouldn't DEFAULT to NTFS (whose backup is going to be under 2GB, anyway?). Since nonstop backup caused the most issues, I'm starting with an 865GB nonstop backup to begin with. It is at 7% already and its only been going fifteen minutes. It was much slower before.
I'll post again if successful. Hopefully this helps someone else having issues. And Acronis: for the love of all things good, please make ASZ default to NTFS, especially if the drive it is going on is formatted NTFS!
Scratch that. NSB stopped after a half hour as before. Looks like more fun with tech support tomorrow. NTFS is still a good idea for ASZ, just didn't fix my problem.