Acronis true image not recognising backup files
Having installed Acronis true image a couple of months ago I have been running weekly incremental backups on top of my first main backup. All well - so far so good. Yesterday I had a system crash that Windows XP system restore could not handle (I lost all of my personalisation data - presumably malware or a corrpution of the file) so I decided to fire up Acronis and undertake a restoration from my several weeks of back ups. I did this with some trepidation having read many posts on this forum outlining probems epeienced by others. But after several hours of chugging away it worked. (No boquets there - thats what I bought the thing for.)
I still have not ascertained why my system crashed, so this morning I checked to make sure the back up files were AOK in case it happens again and I have to complete another restoration.
But now Acronis is telling me I do not have any back ups - even though when viewed from Windows Explorer they are clearly there (and I used them the night before..) What on earth is going on? And how can I fix it?
I have to say from having had a few weeks of using this and checking the many many problems posted in the forum I do not think a more buggy inept piece of software exists on this planet. It is unintuitive (except perhaps for computer geeks) difficult to comprehend whats expected and just seems to have problem after problem. I am not a happy camper!
A simple example of how its not designed for home users - when undertaking the restoration the software asks about handling of the "MBR". This is not a common acronym and I am not a systems person just a mug PC users. What the F is an MBR? After some time of head scratching - actually head banging (remember my system is down so I cannot access the internet to Google it) I decide its probably something like master boot record and that gives me a hint as to what to do. At elast I can now guess. but who is the Einsten that decided that its better to call it this rather than its real name? Why cannot the people who developed this understand that this is intimidating to normal users who have not spent 3 years at uni to become a software engineer. The system is full of such unnecessary complexities - and this is marketed as Acronis True Image HOME!
The definition of TI's target audience has come up before but I don't really think it has been well-defined and that isn't surprising. There are people who know little about a computer topic and after a bit of investigation they have a pretty good grip on the salient points. In the old DOS days, computer users needed to understand more about disk file and folder (directory back then) structures. Now, if you ask a lot of people where their file is, or can you find it with Explorer, a blank look is what you get. The application just puts the file in the default place and finds it there when it needs it. Imaging programs require a bit of knowledge at the partition level or physical disk level. Personally, I would never consider an imaging program for a lot of non-technical users unless I knew somebody was going to set it up for some form of real easy operation.
In other words, if you want to use an imaging program then you'd better be prepared to do a bit of research on the things that you don't understand. Intimidating, yes but that's the way it works.
As far as the Alert that you don't have any backups, is this the yellow band across the ATI screen? If so, just ignore it -- it's a badly thought out, badly designed, cockamamie element of ATI that, luckily can be safely ignored. I jsut look at it as the programmers' way of saying, "The marketing folks said I had to make an Alert feature and have it ready in 2 weeks and this is my revenge." ;)
RE the expertise necessary to successfully, comfortably use ATI, well, ATI is not for the faint of heart unless you can just use all the defaults and keep your fingers crossed. Whether you check MBR or not is usually not important. It would be nice if ATI told you that when offered users the option of including/excluding the MBR.
If you want easy breezy backups, get a Mac and use the backup program built into the OS. I personally think much of the "trouble-free" mystique lauded on apples is overblown (trading simplicity for flexibilty and sometimes being downright wrong) but in this one regard, the hype applies. With PCs, as Seekforever so wisely points out, you have to use google a bit and find out a bit more about certain terms. Moral of the story, nothing good comes easy, especially with computers.
Don't want to interrupt this dialog but, I no longer try to do incremental backups. I run only full backups. With the cost of big hard drives so low it pays to run only full backup overnight to a dedicated hard drive.
I differentiate each backup by using today's date in the name of the backup. It works very well.
I'm running ATI 2009 home. It was a real problem installing to begin with that took about 2 weeks but once I got it in it works very well.
Don't forget to have the Acronis loader Cd always handy.
Best regards,
Werner