Consolidation ignores the backup's split image setting (e.g. 4.7gb) and shoves it all together
Basically Trueimage 2011 (latest release) consolidation ignores the backup's split image setting (e.g. 4.7gb) and shoves it all together. In fact, even if the original archive was split - it then gathers all the split archives and shoves them all into one massive consolidated archive which can't be backed up onto media.
Come on Acronis - two things have to happen.
1) Your teams have to think and have vision of what customers are going to do - all possibilities - not just the path that allows your program to work. Your teams needs to look at all things users want to do, and will try to do within your application. If a program gives you a limit to set the archive size, and it doesn't keep below that limit for each file during any type of operation with that archive - that is a huge failure and massive oversight.
2) If it is a bug then your Q&A needs one hell of a lot of work because this is an obvious flaw.
3) If it is due to some setting being corrupted - your program should check for such things and try to fix them. It is no good practice to tell users to delete everything they have and then start clean because your files get confused. Damn - that is such an admission of incompetency and at best a cover up by the support department since the programmers basically can't get enough information from their own team or Q&A that they can track down such issues and correct them before they ever happen.
The only error that should happen on mission critical systems such as any backup (mission critical to the families and small businesses w/ tax info, photos, documents etc) is a faulty drive. Your backup program should be one of the very most solid part of the computing system installed. It needs to expect and detect corruption of files and conflicting settings and then deal with the conflicts intelligently - enabling the user to have a solid archive - and trust in that archive. Only the naive - or very simple users - have faith in your Trueimage backup series of products. I personally make so many backups that it is a lot of my time because I just can't trust any one of your backups to work.
Another simple bug for kicks - if you create a backup and then save it - dont back up - but then edit settings - it gives you an error. Really? Q&A didnt check for that? If you tell me its a corrupt file, Ill ask why doesn't your system test for corruption and bad data and fix it before it is saved? If you are telling me that disk errors corrupt backup settings but nothing else on many hard drives, then the incompetence is way past control and managers should be fired.
Seriously, I have been with Acronis backup systems for years at different levels. Simply because I keep hoping they will become dependable... It has a very good GUI - but thats about it as far as its greatness. Now I am now going to have to rethink that decision as too many simple errors are getting past your Q&A and your programming team has no vision for self-correcting systems and protecting the validity of backups.
(Another example, if you end your backup name with a #, it is more than likely that Acronis will get very confused and not be able to continue backups once that # is hit, adding another number to it. )
Such simple things that should be cast is stone as not to be able to happen so that users backups are safe and they can count on them when they need them - too many just dumb programming errors and design flaws exist in your current system. It would never survive the red review that my teams conducted on government projects - except for maybe internal testing and absolutely not allowed for mission critical backups.
But for this moment, I need to backup my archive into smaller chunks but your consolidation program threw it all together. Now what? I am assuming you have an archive splitter somewhere that is foolproof, right? You thought of that after so many years and its just under a menu heading I haven't found, correct?
HP