Upgrade to ATI 2010 – Big Mistake!
FIRSTLY, WHEN I COMPLAIN IT’S ALWAYS WITH THE GREATER GOOD IN MIND (AS WELL AS MY OWN NEEDS). THAT’S WHY WHEN I PRESS AN ISSUE, I WANT IT DEALT WITH EVEN IF I’VE GOT A WORK-AROUND OR GIVEN UP OR CHOSEN ANOTHER ROUTE FOR MY OWN NEEDS.
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Upgrade to ATI 2010 – Big Mistake!
See also my other thread on the Acronis True Image Forum: 4261: Cloning my C drive to a PARTITION on a larger disk? Impossible?
I did an upgrade from ATI 2009 to ATI 2010, and prepared a tib backup. It was marked as successful, and I did a VALIDATE and that too was successful. About a week later I was getting warnings that my computer was unprotected, which was odd. I then tried to do an incremental backup. I had to browse for my backup as the program did not find it automatically – maybe this is why I had the warnings? This new version of ATI gave me no choice of incremental or differential – but MAYBE that’s because there’s no difference for the first increment? I did the backup, and validated it. I re-validated the earlier backup – reported as OK. I then tried to open each tib file by double clicking, to explore them. Windows didn’t know what program to use!!!!!! So I designated ATI and tried to open the backups to explore them. All I got was fancy wallpaper. I then delved a bit further and specified Windows Search in case one needed to activate that (though ATI 2009 tib files could be easily explored without that step, and it didn’t specifically say in the 2010 Manual that this was necessary in order to explore archives). Made no difference. More wallpaper.
I then tried a right click. No ‘Explore’ option on the shortcut menu.
I then navigated to RESTORE FILES, and was presented with a Windows Explorer look-alike but it didn’t offer me any option to open and inspect the backup files as I could do with all previous versions of ATI. So I picked some of the least important files and tried to do a restore a RESTORE. It hung with no progress on the progress bar, and after I closed it down I noticed the green highlighting for the relevant date had changed to red. That’s another point. That highlighting is USELESS (and was also in ATI 2009) – as it doesn’t distinguish between several tasks done on the same day. Also useless are the 3*** out of 5***** ratings. NO explanation anywhere of what they mean. No problem (I hope!) if the archive validates OK, but sometimes one has to accept a backup with errors (in my case possibly due to slightly faulty memory – now replaced) one wants know if it’s ‘good enough’… in this imperfect world – or whether it’s no use at all to restore from.
I’m wondering if ATI 2010 has been PROPERLY validated for XP SP3 or has all the effort gone into Vista and Windows 7? Acronis nearly lost my custom with I think it was ATI 9, which was touted for but hadn’t been properly tested on Windows Me, and made my system unbootable.
I have four open threads on the forum: they’ve all gone cold. No-one from Acronis seems to have the responsibility to keep an eye on these threads and ask themselves: is it reasonable to expect the customer to be satisfied, or do I need to chip in again? Yes, I’ve had some valuable comments from Dmitry and Alexander. But I still have unanswered questions. I’ve had email contact with two support staff on two matters. One misinformed me that I wasn’t eligible for a free upgrade, but eventually saw me right when I forwarded all my purchase emails; another gave me irrelevant advice and I’ve invited him to close the ticket unresolved.
One of my forum threads (4261) was asking how to transfer a bootable image of the 250GB C drive to a 250GB PARTITION on a 320GB backup drive. I’m still waiting for a full answer. I DO NOT BELIEVE IT CAN’T BE DONE, but I now suspect I need software other than Acronis and am thus dependent on the good offices of someone in the Community to help me. Indeed someone has in thread 4261 but he’s obviously much more computer-savvy than I am – I still need to know how to do what he recommends, which is basically to do what I am asking how to do! Not the slightest hint that anyone from Acronis thinks that what I want to do might be a good idea to include in their program(s)! I’m more and more coming to the view that I want to backup with a pair of bootable clones, updated alternately. I can update them from a bootup on one of my other three disks (i.e. NOT cloning the disk bearing the OS I’m using!), without having to worry about any of the palaver of rebooting to complete, or errors due to difficulties caused by files being open. I’m getting less and less willing to trust proprietary backup formats – Acronis or anyone else’s. You never know if it works till it’s too late! Why should I fiddle about with virtual machines to validate, as recommended by one of the staff? I’m already able to boot into my second backup disk, which bears a clone of my C drive, and I want to be able to do the same to a partition on my third disk. Backup via bootable clones is the way to go, IMHO. If a clone doesn’t work, you know at once and can do something about it. And if it does work, one is back up and running within a minute of a disk failure of the C drive! Why a partition? My third drive is big enough to partition it and have room for an image of my C drive, and I want the partition for Ubuntu. I’m ditching Windows just as soon as I can.
Many thanks, Mike. I had mislaid my restore disk, though I have now made another - thanks for reminding me! I uninstalled ATI and reinstalled, and it now works fine. The tib files were not corrupted. It's all working fine EXCEPT for a minor irritation, which I hope is not indicative of any serious underlying problem(s): The startup screen is still saying: "Your system is not fully protected. Perform the following operations: Back up my system". But it is adding incremental backups ok. I choose to do these manually, rather than have them scheduled. And I've opted against continuous backup - my computer is not powerful enough to tolerate this.
My ultimate aim is still to use alternating clones for backup, and I'm now having a discussion with the support staff on just how to do this. I can clone my C drive to a disk, but NOT to a partition, and this is what I need to do for one of my pair of clones. Best wishes to all, John
Cloning is traditionally a complete disk drive and certainly so in Acronis speak, so if you want to clone a multipartition drive as single partitions, TI isn't designed to do that.
By the way 2009 also provide a full image if the incremental box was ticked and the archive didn't previously exist.
Are you saying that 2009 allowed you to clone to a partition?
Thanks, Bodgy - Colin! No, neither Acronis TI 2009 nor 2010 would allow me to 'clone' a partition, and I didn't try. There's a lot of confusion here, and I think Acronis True Image is wrongly named!!!!! It should be Acronis True Backup, because although it will allow you to make a true disk IMAGE if you must, the whole philosophy takes you down the route of POTENTIAL images (proprietary tib files) that can only be used via the ATI program. I understand that the word CLONE should be reserved for whole disk images, images which, if the original disk was bootable, will themselves be bootable because they are copies identical in every important respect, incuding the subleties of placement of boot data. I wish Acronis wouldn't refer to tib files as images. ATI will let you make POTENTIAL images (tib files) of partitions or whole disks; it will let you image (clone) a disk to another disk; it will not let you image a disk to a PARTITION (and I mean image, NOT just make a tib file, but I can't use the word clone here, because a clone cannot be by definition put onto a partition, even if the partition is amply big enough). This is what I need to do, as my second backup disk is big, as I want it for an Ubuntu partition as well as to store a bootable image of my XPdisk.