Archive Naming Convention - Goodbye Acronis
Well... after about 6 months and countless threads and posts Acronis finally "officially" addressed the horid, horid archive naming convention in B&R 10. Their response was "We now undersrand our customers want total control over the archive name" and "there is a possibility we might fix it".
Well thank Acronis. He is my response. When you fix it there is a possibility that I might start reselling your product again. A slim possibility but a possibility.
If you look through the posts here and elsewhere on the net it is very, very obvious that Acronis has a really, really bad release in B&R 10 all the way around. Not just the archive naming issue. They put out a bomb. Pulled a Symantec. If they would have beta tested a little and listened to the feedback from the beta testing they could have diverted a disaster.
They thought they were at a point of being a backup God and could ignore their customers and do as they please. Guess what Acronis ... you were wrong. Horrid software and no support. Why would anyone buy your product?
After 6 or 7 years it is time for me to move on. No one likes change especially if what you use works but what can I say. Acronis you forced the move. Good luck. I hope you survive this disaster but I'm not going to wait around and find out.
How about [edited]? It was half the cost of the Acronis we paid for at the time. We only went with Acronis because my predecessor had it already in place otherwise I'd probably gone with [edited]. Now, nearly 6 months of frustration later. I'm wondering if I can still ask for a refund from Acronis. I should have done it at the initial 90 day mark when it appeared that the program was buggy and support only wanted to work around the problems instead of resolving the problems.
Both [edited] and [edited] look promising. Kind of sad isn't it? Acronis was king of the hill and slid all the way to the bottom in one fell swoop. I'll keep you posted on my trials...
I'd never heard of [edited] before until it was mentioned here a few weeks back. It looked to me almost like a clone of the TI and Echo look. I don't know how good it is though,
I agree with Jim, this is one awful product and as far as I'm concerned I will never resell it again no matter what kind of improvements Acronis makes with their products.
First, there is an endless bug list for v.10. Then there is no support; the only time we managed to get a knowledgeable Acronis tech to assist was when we engaged support through a channel manager.
It looks like every time there is a problem with this product they have a new build that you have to install. The problem is that always the new build fixes one thing and breaks another. The last build, 11345, has syntax errors in snapapi26.c! I mean, really? In a final release? Do they even test what they release?
snapapi26 has never worked properly and it doesn't look like it will ever work. AMS reports backup sizes and successful tasks when in fact the archive is 0KB. Agents not registering, backup policies not being deployed, atrocious performance and on and on.
We have a client that spent $7K in Acronis licensing only to get a lemon.
Class Action Lawsuit?
Where do I sign up?
I'm just starting with ABR 10, but I'd have to agree...this is the buggiest software I've ever dealt with. I have an issue with the file naming AND the fact that the files are buried so far down in the directory structure.
I agree with you Ken and Stephen. Maybe a class action lawsuit is just what the doctor ordered. I would sign on moment's notice. I am still just in a state of shock that Acronis would pull such a brain fart. My question would be "would they be in business long enough that a class action lawsuit would do any good"?
Their "one step forward, two steps back" has been going on forever. I don't know if Acronis has ever give it any thought but what they might want to do is keep developing the Echo series products. Get the remaining bugs out of it and make it rocks solid. They obviously weren't thinking or they would have done that before taking such a huge gamble on ABR 10. At least that way customers would have had something reliable to fall back on while they try and correct the ABR 10 disaster. But what do I know...
Both [edited] and [edited] look promising. Kind of sad isn't it? Acronis was king of the hill and slid all the way to the bottom in one fell swoop. I'll keep you posted on my trials...
Very sad... we bought a single license for B&R 10 as part of the project to look at our build for Windows 7. Saying it's been a disaster is an understatement.
What I cannot equally understand is that there hasn't been a release since early December 2009. That's nearly five months ago. That's a lot of time to fix bugs IMO.
[edited] looks promising but, unfortuantely, it's not without it's problems. The recovery CD doesn't detect the network card on the 2 or 3 systems we've tried.
It could be that all this imaging software will be moot in a few years time. Going off to see Citrix on Thursday and will get to see a demo of their recently release XenClient product. This is bare metal client virtualisation. Once that's in place, the very stable snapshot and backup technology behind it will make products like B&R almost redundant.
Cheers, Rob.
Well I can't find the "Official Archive Naming" thread since they reworked the forums so my timing might be a week or two off but I am going to say "Happy Anniversary"!
Just about a year ago Acronis came out with this wonderful, flawless BR10. A joy to work with and a joy to use! Runs like a champ! The only small, trivial bug with it was the inability to specfically control the archive image name hence the minor problem of not being able to overwrite a previous archive.
I know no one else complained. I know no one else thought this was a problem. It was just me LOL. We were promised a fix. We were promised the sun, moon and stars. Here we are a year later and the problem still exists. A YEAR!!! Thanks Acronis. What a company! What Support! What a product!
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!!!!!
I agree with Jim, this is one awful product and as far as I'm concerned I will never resell it again no matter what kind of improvements Acronis makes with their products.First, there is an endless bug list for v.10. Then there is no support; the only time we managed to get a knowledgeable Acronis tech to assist was when we engaged support through a channel manager.
It looks like every time there is a problem with this product they have a new build that you have to install. The problem is that always the new build fixes one thing and breaks another. The last build, 11345, has syntax errors in snapapi26.c! I mean, really? In a final release? Do they even test what they release?
snapapi26 has never worked properly and it doesn't look like it will ever work. AMS reports backup sizes and successful tasks when in fact the archive is 0KB. Agents not registering, backup policies not being deployed, atrocious performance and on and on.
We have a client that spent $7K in Acronis licensing only to get a lemon.
I personally know someone who spent 100.000 euros (!!) on Acronis licensing.
Needless to say it was a huge waste of money.
I agree with you guys about [edited]: it looks very promising. The reason why we didn't go for it is the lack of support for Linux servers. Had we imagined the fact that Acronis doesn't work properly on linux anyway, we couldt have considered [edited] more seriously...
I completely agree.
I have asked for and received a refund for my product and unfortunately i think Acronis is now only suitable for occasional home users, or for users that need a bootable cd to back up and restore images cold with.
I cannot trust BR10 for Enterprise backup, and by the time i think i'll be able to, i will not be planning on changing backup vendor. Another customer lost.
Bad product is one thing. Out-sourcing most of the techs to dubai or wherever to people who don't seem to undertsand computers or English was just too much to deal with time after time.
I must admit that in my experience the customer care has always been very good and quite prompt, even when clearly there wasn't any immediate solution to the multitude of issues I was experiencing.
I agree with you, Darryl, on the fact that ABR10 isn't jet reliable for an enterprise environment, despite being a promising software. It is clearly a product still in the process of being developed. we'll see what happens in one year or two.
I agree with all the above. Especially the Happy Anniversary. A whole year and the major problems have yet to really be addressed and/or resolved. Doesn't the logo on the software say something like "Compute with Confidence"? Haven't been able to for years. They should change the logo to read "Feeling Lucky Today?".
Ditto all of the above. And no, Acronis is NOT ok for occasional home users. It needs to work, be reasonably intuitive and have decent documentation. IMO, it has none of these. I've spent 2-3 years now trying to use it. I'm done.
As a user of Acronis (echo and ABR10) for over 2 years I can safely say if you use it wisely it works fine. We backup over 200 servers daily and have over 120Tb of storage running 10 storage nodes and over 40 vaults's, we mainly use unmanaged vaults and custom backup policies, but also use the full packages of uni restore and deduplication sql backup, vm agents and managed vaults. Our enviroment inculdes all flavours of windows and Linux and VM (esx, xen etc) multi TB disks/raid configs, lvm etc. You will always get the odd machine that requires manual snapapi build or tweeks to backup config etc. Anyone spending 7k on licences should look at upgrading to VIP support as this much better. If you are a channel partner I would suggest going on the ACE certified engineer course that they run. This will help you and your customers use the product to its full potential.
Sorry Matt but I have to strongly disagree. You are not the norm. Very few business spend 7k on licenses and take advantage of VIP support simply of the costs involved. You have a whole staff dedicated to backups. You are the exception and not the rule. The "odd" machine is the one that works right.
If we were all in your situation with a entire staff devoted to backing up and an unlimited budget I am sure we could all get Acronis working right too.