Too flaky to use
I had been using Acronis True Image 2010 as one of my backups for my desktop Win 7 x64 system with good success -- until without warning or notice the backups suddenly stopped being reliable about 6 weeks ago. I found out about it when I needed to restore, and couldn't.
Fortunately I had not depended exclusively on Acronis, and when it betrayed me I had a fallback in the form of a ShadowProtect set of less optimal date. It worked fine and after some trouble I was able to restore most of what had been lost due to its non-optimal date. When I got the system back in full operation I tried backing up with Acronis (build 7,046) and have found that it simply does not work, although the symptoms are erratic and vary from attempt to attempt. Last night for instance, I started a full backup to an empty HD with plenty of room. When I came back, twelve hours later, Acronis reported that the backup still had 1 day, 14 hours to go.
I sent Acronis a message a few days ago and got an automated respons promising prompt attention -- and nothing more. I suppose they figure it is better to spend the money on advertising than customer support.
So I am relying on ShadowProtect (which has always been very reliable for me) and looking for another product to supplement it.

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I've tried it on two separate external USB drives (which work fine with ShadowProtect) and a second internal HD (SATA) -- none work.
I have not disabled Microsoft auto updating, so no doubt there have been updates. I have not made any major changes to my software configuration. Again, whatever may have affected Aconis, it left ShadowProtect working fine (and also MirrorFolder).
When I tried to restore the disk image using Acronis it wanted to reboot, but after rebooting flashed a message saying "/bin/lpwatchd: error while loading shared libraries: libpcap.so.0.9.4: cannnot open shared object file: No such file or directory."
Restore then failed and the system returned to original state. I sent this information and the AcronisInfo file to Acronis. After a few days I received a response saying, in essence, Can't be our problem, Mate. Just check every other possibility and you should be fine.
All my backups are full disk images and I was attempting to restore the full system. I use MirrorFolder for folder backups, running in pseudo-RAID 1 mode. That's how I was able to recover pretty nearly everything even though I had to restore from an older backup.
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Was either ShadowProtect or TI updated, uninstalled/reinstalled, or otherwise changed around the time the backups stopped working?
Having multiple imaging programs doesn't always work well. It depends on the drivers, how they hook into the system, etc.
Did you try the downloaded ISO version of TI (available in your Acronis account)? It uses a different loader and may have more current drivers.
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