Why I'm uninstalling Acronis
Hi,
I am about to uninstall Acronis, this was not an easy decision having been a long term user (from v2009), but frankly at best I've always found the product a bit slow with some 'quirks' but my recent upgrade (and purchase) has left me frustrated and 'throwing my teddies out of the pram'.
Before I go any further I will say that Acronis have tried to contact me to help with 'issues' - but I have simply been too busy to get involved in fixing what I feel are fundamental problems with the software that, looking in the forums have been issues for a while. So perhaps not quite fair on Acronis but they do need to get the fundamentals right and I hope that this post will encourage them to do so.
I've been a computer consultant for many years and back in the early days backup software was complex and not particularly easy to use. I thought we were past that. Recently in my Virtualisation environments I've managed to find software that installed quickly and ran flawlessly. This is not my experience with Acronis. My problems are:
- Its slow backing up.
- It takes up huge recources.
- It sits 'cleaning up' for hours (literrally) saying minutes to go.
- The current version ignores any schedules I have set and backs up many times a day (full) taking up all my disk space - and cloud backups act the same (apart from the disk space of course :-) )
- It prevents my machine from shutting down properly
- Mounting an image takes ages
- Consolidating images is glacial
These are just a few of the issues, and as I say Acronis have tried contacting me and I am sure we may have gotten through most of these with the investment of some time. I am a realist and do not expect software to be bug free - but I do expect the fundamentals to work well and not lead me to tear my hair out creating and recreating schedules etc.
This is just my experience I am sharing and I am sure your mileage may vary.
So I'm sure this may get flamed by some Acronis devotees on this forum but please take this post as intended, Acronis get your act sorted, get the basic product right and you may not need as much 'world class support'.
Hi Steve,
Thanks you for a sensible and pro-active response. I did not realise that Acronis did not monitor these forums. I will post this to Acronis directly.
Regards
I'm going to uninstall it if the other s/w I'm curring testing works out. I just recently paid for a year of it, after having few problems during the trial. After the trial, however:
-It just doesn't backup to the cloud for days on end because it gets hung up on a backup, and doesn't automatically quit and try again later. I can't understand why it's designed to just stay stuck for days - literally, 3-5 days with no backups (it's set to backup twice daily).
-I searched online for solutions. I've tried disabling VSS (no help) and using the schedule manager tool (doesn't help every time).
-Manual backups to the cloud, or to my external hard drive almost always get stuck on "Preparing Data", and that's when I have to try task zap, ending processes and rebooting. Sometimes I hit the right combination after about half an hour of trying.
-The best solution is to reinstall the software. I've had to do that about once every two weeks.
I can do a manual backup in less time than this. I had chosen Acronis because of the ability to make a full image in the cloud - most companies only want to put your data in the cloud, so your full image is on a local drive which is no use if it fails, gets stolen, etc. But at this rate, I seriously doubt I'd ever be able to successfully download the cloud image anyway.
Jenn, I would recommend dropping a private message to Gaidar, General Manager of Acronis True Image and ask him to look into your problems - you have a year of support with ATIH 2017 as part of your purchase.
But I've read the forums and the kb, and people have been having this problem since at least 2014, and no fixes have been found. Just workarounds which didn't work for me, and also aren't real solutions. I work about 80 hours a week on my business - what are the odds this tech support is going to find a fix they haven't found in two years? I don't have the time to spend when I can just start using a different system and live without a cloud backup of the OS, apps and settings, like most people do.
Jenn, I understand your frustration and would love to be able to offer you an answer to why you are having these problems but we (MVP's) have no access to any of the Acronis Cloud servers / systems etc that might show why your backups are failing.
Acronis have a definite vested interest in getting this working for you because it is a great selling point, but only if it is both reliable and fit for purpose - hence my suggestion to go to the top man, Gaidar, and get him onside with bringing some real focus on what the real root cause is and then resolving this, assuming it is within Acronis' remit to do so.
You are not alone, DickieF and Jenn89.
I am replacing ATI 2016 with another backup program because of ATI's persistent failures to complete a backup job. It will run fine for days or weeks and then fail on one or more of the same jobs that have been running fine. The lack of decent error reporting just makes it more frustrating. Yesterday, I spent about two hours before finally getting a fifteen-minute backup to run successfully.
I have used Acronis for many years for disk cloning, and will keep the program around for that purpose, but I have had enough of the unreliability of the backup program. Because of the manner in which the program fails so often, I no longer have any confidence that the backups being created are valid.