Continuous upgrade notification appears to be marketing indeed

Acronis tech support has never been very good.

I was also disappointed with the response from Anna Trifonova and her summarily locking the old thread after her response.

The "solutions" she provides are not really solutions. HIDING the upgrade notifications in the tray is NOT A SOLUTION!

Blocking IP addresses via the HOST file is also NOT A SOLUTION.

These are bypasses at best to overcome poor programming on Acronis's side.

btw: The support rep I have been communicating with wrote yesterday that a new release would fix this issue but I would not rely on that as being accurate. I don't think Acronis has EVER released an update to a previous version after they have brought out a new release.

Today, I did get a reply from that managers@acronis.com email address that I wrote to on October 3rd. I had (basically) sent them a "wake up and smell the coffee" type of message. They wrote back today and attached (2) Bat files that can be run to disable and/or enable notifications from Acronis. I looked inside the Bat files and found that they were adding/removing the same set of arguments into the Hosts file that Acronis Users had already figured out.
"0.0.0.0 download.acronis.com"

Nothing new there for me and I had already previously added a similar argument to one of my PCs. I'm guessing that is what someone would receive (the Bat files) if they contacted Anna Trifonova via PM as her response provided.

I'm not surprised that she locked the thread. I expect that Acronis would like to see that topic start disappearing down the active list vs being resurrected to the top almost daily. TI2014 works just fine for me, I run it daily without problem and will be passing on TI2015 as designed. All the best to our brethren users (beta 2015 testers) here and may your backups always restore! :)

Well said, TEX

Could you please post those 2 mentioned .bat files? just interested...

Ken, here are the direct copy-n-paste contents of both of the .bat files. I did not use either of them because I'd already solved the problem myself on my PCs. So, I can't vouch for how well they work or the contents of the files. People would need to contact Acronis or Anna Trifonova if they have any issues or questions using the .bat files.

"disable_notifications.bat" file to turn "off" the upgrade notifications:

@echo off
echo.
echo 0.0.0.0 download.acronis.com >> c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

"enable_notifications.bat" file to turn "on" the upgrade notifications:

@echo off
    setlocal enableextensions disabledelayedexpansion

    set "file=c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"

    for /f "tokens=* delims=0123456789" %%a in (
        'findstr /n /i /v /c:"download.acronis.com" "%file%" ^& type nul ^> "%file%"'
    ) do (
        set "line=%%a"
        setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
        >>"%file%" echo(!line:~1!
        endlocal
    )

    endlocal

Around the time I started getting the irritating and serial notifications to upgrade from my ti 2014, the activation due to hardware id change started even though I didn't change my hardware. While I do not count out something being wrong with my machine, the timing is mighty suspicious and I cannot help but tie it to added pressure to upgrade to 2015, which I was seriously considering doing until I found out that my favorite shredder function is not longer a part of tools. I know its a tiny function, but I grew to use it frequently. I don't think I'll continue on with this product because marketing is more important than getting the product right - just my thoughts here.

thanks Tex for the files!

@Clarence Williamson:
just rerun setup2014.exe and choose "repair" - that should fix your "hardware id has changed" problem

Thank you Ken sandal. After doing that, so far so good. Take care.

Hello Everyone,

I'm very sorry, that you are so frustrated with closing the thread 65648, it wasn't meant to be an insult to anyone.

I just didn't want my message to get lost, because from experience I know how often it happens in such hot threads.

Thank you.

Anna, I can see that you are trying to help, so thank-you for responding both here and in the other thread. Your logic for closing the thread makes sense to me. I have also had some good emails from the managers@acronis vehicle. From those emails, I can tell that you folks are very aware of the issue and (as they say) "they are putting a lot of effort into it". That is good to know.

My main suggestion to them is to engage the customers early on, acknowledge the problem and provide us some sort of follow-up as things move along. The silence, across many days was the worst effect. I think most of us know that you may not have an exact fix within just a few days and most people could tolerate waiting for the fix. It is the interim communications, work-arounds, status, etc that are important and this forum is probably as good a place as any to do that.

I agree with Tex. It did take several weeks to get a response from Acronis, but it did eventually come.

Yes, it consisted of instructions to turn notifications from Acronis OFF in the Taskbar Manager, but as the annoying popups stopped I consider it to be as good as a fix.

I don't imagine I will miss anything important.

The real problem with this whole thing has been the lack of a prompt, complete, helpful response from Acronis.

It baffles me that they seemed to ignore a screamingly frustrated user base - for no apparent cause.

What, one wonders, could be so all-consuming that enterprise customers are left to twist in the wind?

Whatever, for me this sorry saga had come to its end.

original disable_notifications.bat posted by Tex is not suitable for every situation:

1. hosts file might be write-protected
2. last line of hosts might have no line feed
3. XP system drive might be other than c:\

better run following code, saved as "disable_notifications.bat".
run it "as admin"!

@echo off
set file=%SYSTEMROOT%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
attrib -s -h -r %file%
echo.>>%file%
echo 0.0.0.0 download.acronis.com >>%file%