Acronis True Image Home 2010 Release Date - WIN 7 Supported.
All,
The following email response was received from ACRONIS Support last week to an enquiry of mine:
"....Acronis True Image Home 2009 will be replaced by Acronis True Image Home 2010 on the 16th of this month, this will be Windows 7 compatible. An upgrade between the two is available."
I await confirmation of whether a free upgrade from 2009 ATI Home will be made available. They are still advertising and selling ATI Home 2009 edition on their website - so they surely must be obliged to provide a free upgrade to all users within the 12m purchase period.....
The email I received did not lead me to believe ATI Home 2009 will be made backward compatible with WIN 7.
Cheers,
S.
Hello Sheeds,
Thank you for using Acronis Products
At the moment, the following Acronis products support Windows 7:
(!) Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 supports Windows 7 with the following limitations:
- Mounting backups stored in Acronis Secure Zone is not possible;
- Mounting backups located on a network share in read/write mode is not possible;
- The Active Restore feature is not available when restoring a system volume in Windows from a backup stored in Acronis Secure Zone;
- User accounts generated for Acronis services during the product installation may appear on the Windows 7 logon screen.
With regards to your question, our upgrade policy is to provide free upgrade to customers who purchased the software within 30 days prior to the release of the new version of the product.
We realize that the 30 day cut-off might seem arbitrary, but it keeps with the procedures of other established software companies. If we had a 90 day cut-off, someone who had purchased the product 91 days before would be unhappy anyway. At some point we have to draw a line and move on to working on the next version.
Dmitry,
Thanks for your reply. I will be taking my case up with Acronis Australia - as I find it completely unacceptable that a product I purchased at the end of June for my forseeable future needs, is not to be supported, patched or considered eligible for upgrade in the advent of the new windows OPSYS released in 4-6 weeks which renders it inoperable/unreliable.
Most reputable software companies consider a reasonable expected upgrade period for software purchases of 12 months - I can name numerous examples of this (anti-virus, network, virtual-drive, Movie Making etc etc apps). Your position is both disappointing and appears profit driven rather than customer focused.
BTW - where on the website or in store prior to the purchase act is the upgrades policy made clear to the customer ? Also - in your own terms and conditions re: product warranty:
- The warranty period by cleverbridge expires 24 months after the product has been received by the customer. Is the customer an end user, he has the choice of rectifications of defects or replacement. cleverbridge has the right to reject the chosen type of remedy, if the cost associated with the chosen type is disproportionate to the remedy offered by the other remedy offered, and no disadvantages arise from this decision for the customer. Is the performed fulfillment not satisfactory, the customer has the right to request a reduced price or revoke the contract. Should the customer be entitled to a refund rather than replacement, cleverbridge is only liable for the amount paid for the software at the time of purchase, not for any further damages. For the rest any other liabilities in conjunction with defective or wrong deliveries or breach of contracts in conjunction with the fulfillment and any other liability claims due to negligence are excluded from these terms and conditions.
I would expect customer complaints under this term will keep all the ATI Home 2009 customer service team busy for the forseeable months following WIN 7's release. In my case, I have used less than 15% of the total warranty period above - whereas your arbitrary cutoff actually renders the actual patch/upgrade component of your warranty from 24 months, to 1 - ie 4% of the overall term above.
unhappy customer.
If you are in Australia, you can probably lodge an enquiry with the relevant state consumer affairs (e.g. in Victoria it is Consumer Affairs Victoria), and find out whether it violates the Trade Practices Act (1974) which states that an item sold must be "fit for the purpose for which it is sold". It depends on what representations Acronis make (impled or explicit). There is also "The Investigator" in the Australian PC Authority, who investgates complaints like this rather publically. They have a far higher success rate at getting around stonewalling than individuals, since their readership is exactly the target audience for such products.
Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Acronis, but I think with the W7/2009-2010 issue they have mismanaged it pretty significantly.
I will certainly buy ATI 2010 when it is released, but I am surprised and disappointed that installation of the beta on a bog-standard W7 fails, and there has been no feedback as to what the problem is...the beta testing is meant to be a mechanism for ironing out bugs - I cannot imagine a more serious bug than not being able to instal a piece of software...
Going by the logic as I understand it, when I purchased my Peugeot in February 2007, Peugeot Australia introduced the 308 a few months later. Surprisingly Peugeot didn't offer me a free upgrade from a 307 to a 308 even though I had a 3 year warranty.
Why expect a software company to operate by different rules to most other businesses? A new version of something is always going to arrive and someone somewhere is going to be the person who misses out by a day.
Such is life!!!
Perhaps instead of being belligerant and stomping feet,if the install problem had been posted here before leaping off the deep end, people might have been able to help.
A non whinging person!
Perhaps the problem also has something to do with what can reasonably be expected in regards to updating, as opposed to new versions or releases.
In my opinion one expects a new version to provide new features, and purchasers of an existing version should not reasonably expect to get new features introduced in the newer version for free, however they are within their rights to expect bugs and functions in the version they purchased to be fixed, and there is no legal time frame to enable the manufacturer of a product to escape their responsibility for correcting problems.
Unfortunately Acronis has a bad track record going back through a number of versions of leaving multiple items in existing versions that don't work properly unfixed, and simply moving on to a new version, which becomes an issue of whether a user should have to pay to have design faults in the product fixed.
Going by the logic as I understand it, when I purchased my Peugeot in February 2007, Peugeot Australia introduced the 308 a few months later. Surprisingly Peugeot didn't offer me a free upgrade from a 307 to a 308 even though I had a 3 year warranty.
Your analogy is flawed. My personal emails to Acronis support and even my post above mention, and were focused on the primary aim of a "patch" or fix to enable ATI 2009 Home to work 100% correctly with WIN 7. Your said Peugeot, purchased in Feb 2007 failed to start and work at all three months after you bought it....with my personal expectation that the mechanics at Acronis would have a factory fitted service to get the car smoothly back on the road - not to tell me sorry, I know it's 3m old but you will have to buy the new model - we don't support that old model at all now - unless you bought it within 30 days.
Of course, I needn't go down the path of justifying the reasons we all upgrade to new OPSYS (safety, security, performance, ease of use etc)...
Oh BTW - I haven't installed my Vista Version on WIN7 at all if you had bothered to read my post correctly. I directly engaged Acronis support (posting part of their answer in my original post above) after researching EACH and EVERY program I need to use before moving my home PC to WIN7.
I just expect that this still selling Acronis release is going to be supported in the new MS OPSYS now in RTM, 6 weeks or less from official sale dates....
Ty.
PS - I thought this was somewhat ironic....trust you agree.
Bodgie is an Australian word meaning: Dubious, suspect, or of inferior quality, probably synonymous with the British dodgy
Going by the logic as I understand it, when I purchased my Peugeot in February 2007, Peugeot Australia introduced the 308 a few months later. Surprisingly Peugeot didn't offer me a free upgrade from a 307 to a 308 even though I had a 3 year warranty.
Why expect a software company to operate by different rules to most other businesses? A new version of something is always going to arrive and someone somewhere is going to be the person who misses out by a day.
Such is life!!!
Perhaps instead of being belligerant and stomping feet,if the install problem had been posted here before leaping off the deep end, people might have been able to help.
A non whinging person!
Would you expect any company to send out promotional emails as Acronis did to me, advising to upgrade to a product they knew would be out of date in a few months, knowing that there would be no cheap or free way to upgrade to it? All other companies I have dealt with offer a free upgrade if the product is upgraded within 12 months of purchase. Some do charge a nominal fee, some not.