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How good is the 2016 Product?

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I am an IT professional and PC consultant.  I’ve been putting Acronis TI on my customer’s computers for years.  It seems like every year a new version is put out with no guarantee that it’s overall better than the last. This has led to some enormously time consuming problems.  The most recent was with the 2014 version where the computer looped at shutdown saying to wait until the program finished, but it never finished.  I think that version may have slowed up my client’s computers considerably. My customers must have backups but it's embarassing and costly to me when I put a product on their computers with results like that. 

Nonetheless I feel the product has gotten generally better through the years.  Also there’s that old saying, The evil one knows is preferable to the evil one doesn’t.

I would like to ask your opinions, especially computer professionals, about whether I should upgrade my client's computers to 2016.    

Thanks,

Al

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Alan, I think you're going to get a lot of different answers here - probably more bad references than not as usually those posting in forums are the ones having trouble or issue with the product and you're mostly going to hear the negatives about the product.

I would recommend downloading the trial and testing it out to see what you think and not be influenced by recommendations.  You can also purchase the full version and then have 30 days, no questions asked, to return it if you don't like it for any reason.

In my opinion, 2016 works well, but a lot depends on how well your system and OS are configured and working to begin with, plus the tye of hardware you use for backups.  A lot of the issues we see in the forum are related to bad hard drives with dirty sectors, or those who have either upgraded from a previous OS and brought along issues with their upgrade and/or have upgraded from an older version of ATIH instead of running through a full cleanup removal and installing from a fresh point.

I have had some qwerks with the Windows installed application of ATIH2016, but am comfortable with it now and know how to resolve issues if/when they show up.  This is not specific to Acronis (other backup applications have these types of issues as well and a lot really does depend on your OS and hardware setup and health).  That said, for any issues in the Windows Application, offline bootable media and backup/ecovery is 100% rock solid and there are options to use default Linux bootable recovery as well as WinPE bootable media for backup/recovery.

If you use the trial and or purchase a license and are still on the fence after that, maybe hold off until 2017 is released.  There is a lot of feedback coming in from the Acronis MVP program and I think we are going to see a lot of nice feature improvements and changes in the next release, but we just don't know at this point.  

Thank you for that well considered opinion.  More important than new features are overall relability.  I have it on my machine now and will be upgrading several of my users to see how it does.  Since I'm upgrading many customers to SSDs and using older internal hard drives for backup, I'd be curious if anyone has seen glitches in like environments.  Are there any problems with USB 3.0 external drives?   Are people seeing the increased speed we are supposed to get with USB 3.0.  Are there stability issues?

Thanks,

Alan

I believe that you will be fine - the new SSD's should provide a lot of performance boost for the systems and using the old drives for backup is probably what a lot of people do as well.  Unfortunatley, all hard drives eventually will fail at some point so can't say for sure if those old ones will work for everyone.  If you've formatted them first and run chkdsk /f /r and or tested them wiht other tools that show they are healthy, hopefully they will continue to be for many more years to come.

We have seen several posts with users who have issues with either an error such as "database can not load" and Acronis in Windows does nothing, or "weird things" with backup sets suddenly not working or not being found.  The do point to the Acronis Database in Windows being corrupted, but the cause is usually never identified... although often is the result of systemic issues on the OS itself, and/or bad disks on the OS or the backup disk.

In most cases, if this does occur though, the database can be repaired with these instructions:  http://forum.acronis.com/forum/112612#comment-334353.  I have had this happen to me on two different occassions, but can't say what caused it either, but the recommended resolution did work.  If you are upgrading from previous versions of ATIH, I woudl still recommend a full clean uninstall and reinstall with this task: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/113656#comment-334624

USB 3.0 is working great for my backups.  It will depend on the type of drive and/or your USB 3.0 controller performance though (even on my main pc, the embedded back ports are slower than the USB 3.0 header ports on the front - which is usually opposite).  If I use an SSD with USB 3.0, high compression and encryption, I can backup 75GB in under 7 minutes with a UASP compliant USB 3.0 to SATA adapter - averaging about 400Mb/s Read and 350 Mb/s Write.  Some of my other USB 3.0 adapters seem to top out at about 250Mb/s Read and 200Mb/s Write using the same SSD drive and same USB ports. Spinning drives are comparable to what you'd expect with roughly 150Mb/s Read/Write in Acronis (on my system).  Long story short, USB 3.0 performance is pretty good, but you may see fluctuations based upon the type of disk you're writing to, the type of USB adatper used and the USB performance of the controller in your systems.  Overall though, USB 3.0 performance should rival eSATA and blow away USB 2.0.