Acronis is no longer #1 in my opinion

Acronis is no longer #1 in my opinion. But why would I write this on an Acronis forum? Because I would like to see the product become the best again, with real development and support, and a company responsive to customers. Act like you care! Also, as an owner of ATI 2016, I feel entitled to say something.

I've been an Acronis user and supporter since they first made their presence around 2001/2002. The product has always had some feature not working. But in general, it did what I needed, and there were few alternatives.

By the 2014 version on an XP machine, True Image continued to work well enough, although more of the features stopped working, or never did. Support was basically useless. It was outsourced, but that didn't matter. I've found excellent tech help from other outsourced support, 'real' technicians at other companies. It’s not about the location; it IS about the training given to support techs, the job skills required and expected, and the needed ability to communicate with the customers. Acronis fails me in this regard.

I bought a new system, Windows 8/8.1. ATI 2014 had even more issues. Scheduling stopped working, incrementals failed. My one need, a full back up now and then continued to work.

Then, last month, I did the free upgrade to Windows 10. ATI 2014 stopped working for me. It would hang and never finish a backup. (I understand that it does work for a minority of folks on Windows 10.) I figured it was time for an upgrade and I went directly to 2016 after ‘completely’ uninstalling 2014. It didn’t work any better than 2014 and it had even more issues. It would not finish a backup, crashed window's explorer on uninstall and reinstall, and other features crashed the program. Support was ridiculous and a time waster. Each support email response included a ridiculous set of requests expecting me to have the tech knowledge they do not, and to to try things I don't have a clue about. The email response to mine, often 5 days later began with, "I am sorry for the delay in response" and then repeated that they cannot help unless I complied with their requests to 'alter my registry', 'rename *.dll files from other software', use 3rd party softwares to extract data and create logs" or whatever. I had no idea what they wanted and do not have the time or desire to read the numerous reference pages they included explaining in technical language what they were asking me to do to ‘help them’. Where was the part about helping me?

I see that people here on the forums talk about rolling back to an older version to 'fix' issues with 2015 or 2016, or to regain features that have been removed.

MY POINT IS THIS: Why should anyone have to go through what I did to TRY and make the software work, by altering windows processes, messing with VSS and other services, altering dll files from other software, using no less than five 3rd party software to give Acronis the data they say they need to fix my issue that was never fixed. (One of those 3rd party softwares hijacked my browser and installed 3 more software, and YES, I did opt out during the install, but it did it regardless.)

Purchased software should work out of the box, period. If it doesn’t, the issue should be known to a company paying attention. It should be easily fixed with a patch to the software, not by altering Windows and other softwares. For a very, very few, software may not work at all, perhaps some incompatibility. But if there are more than a few different seemingly unsolvable issues, than the software has the problem. I do not believe I am one of the very, very few because I see numerous references to my issues on Acronis forums, and because every one of the alternative softwares works for me, out of the box.

I have contributed a 'fix' for 2015/2016 image unmount issues with WD USB hard drives. While not an ATI generated problem, Acronis should have figured it out before it did. I am not a computer tech, I am a Registered Nurse. And Acronis could not begin to fix my other 2016 issues, most importantly, not completing a backup. I tried sending all the logs and data requested, did a remote session and put up with the ridiculous emails and nothing worked.

So, I have been refunded for one copy of ATI 2016. I had also bought ATI 2016 for an office PC under company name, never checked to see if it works. It doesn’t and it is too late for a refund.

I have researched product reliability, features and company to customer responsiveness and Macrium Reflect comes out way ahead of Acronis. That's my opinion. EaseUs Todo seems like a decent product but the company has a 'sneaky' refund policy and support is less than ideal. I am still trying Macrium 6 Free and will purchase the Home version to equal the features of Acronis 2016.