VERY POOR SUPPORT
Support? I updated to Home Edition 11 yesterday. Now it does not run. There appears to be no support AT ALL for new products, or even upgrades. Am I to expect that I have to purchase a $9.95 SINGLE INCIDENT support item EVERY TIME this product does not work? This is completely ridiculous.
Once I purchase the $9.95 SINGLE INCIDENT support item, it took me to a page that then said "Free email and chat support". Amazing isn't it? However, I still have no way of contacting support, either by email or via chat.
At this point, I would find it very difficult to reccomend this product to anyone.
Regards,
Miles
Miles,
If you check in your account, you'll see you get 30 days free support from your purchase date.
Support@acronis.com does not work, and I have not found anywhere on the site that allows me to chat. True Image 11 won't even load now, it just sits there and spins. What is different about the way this version loads vs True Image 10, which worked great.
What exactly doesn't work on the website?
Did you log into your account and then from the support page click on the large orange button?
What other programs do you have running in the background, especially Av and Firewall?
Have you tried re-installing or running a repair install?
Do you have Admin permissions, is UAC activated (if running Vista or W7)?
Try de-activating your firewall whilst installing.
Check in Services.msc that Acronis services are installed and that RPC server is set to automatic and is running.
As it turns out, I had not registered my upgrade. Once that was done, (magically) new support options like email and chat appeared. I submitted a support ticket, but haven't heard back yet... I wonder if I will hear anything within the 30 support period....
AFAIK, the chat option is the one that provides the best response.
Can't agree on that Chat option. I just installed 2011 and ran into an e-mail backup problem. Went around in circles for an eternity with the Chat person and got nowhere. I have to find a solution or get rid of 2011. And I bought a 2nd license! More fool I.
Donald,
Have you started a thread here, in case someone has an answer for you?
Support finally contacted, and told me that I would have to "clean" my system of all traces of True Image 10/11, as shown below. However, the link to the windows Installer Cleanup utility wouldn't download properly, so I skipped that step, but did complete the others. I reinstalled True Image 11, then rebooted (again!), and guess what? It sits there and spins when I click the "Backup my critical data" option. So now what? Are you listening Acronis Support?
[1#] Start => Control Panel => add/remove programs => uninstall Acronis True Image 2011 Home & Acronis True Image Home 2010 (if still in the list).
[2#] run Acronis Cleanup Utility (please follow the link to download Acronis Cleanup utility http://kb.acronis.com/sites/default/files/content/2010/01/7533/true_ima…)
[3#] run Windows Installer Cleanup Utility to clean all the instances of Acronis ( please follow the link to download Windows Installer Cleanup utility http://download.softpedia.com/dl/437a7f261447db5a5433a2c1beb7e646/4c73f…)
[4#] Reboot the PC.
[5#] After reboot please reinstall Acronis True Image Home 2011 and try to launch the product it will definitely work.
NOTE: Windows installer cleanup utility is provided by www.softpedia.com. Softpedia is a Third party website
This is getting richer by the moment. I uninstalled True Image 11 because it was not working. I then rebooted. I installed True Image 10 (why not go with what works eh?). I rebooted again. When I started True Image 10, it asked me for my 64-character serial number. I entered the right one for True Image 10.
Guess what? "The serial number is invalid". I expect that when I installed True Image 11, it invalidated my version 10 key. What a mess this is, and I can't believe what VERY POOR SUPPORT this company has. Is this release strictly a cash grab? Do I need to go make a youtube video to get my point across, and perhaps get some real support.
I also paid $9.95 for a single incident support (which I should not have had to), and the !@#$!@#$ damn software still doesn't work. Not only has Acronis screwed with this very shoddy True Image 11, but now they have double-screwed me by not allowing me to install my paid-for version 10.
What a mess, and what VERY POOR SUPPORT for a VERY POOR PIECE OF SOFTWARE.
Miles,
Right click the on the installation menu of either 2010 or 2011 and select extract.
Run the resulting MSI installer.
If still no luck, run the installer with logging enabled (see one of my other posts for details).
From that it can be discerned if the old serial number is still in registry, which can then be deleted and hopefully you should eb able to install 2010 again.
Could you post what your actual probkem with 2011 was, in case any one here has an answer for you.
V11 just won't run. V10 was working fine until I started getting these sector 0 read errors. And yes, I have examined my hard drive to exhaustion, its not the hard drive! So I upgraded to v11, thinking that this might help. Nope. It just sits there and spins. Now I can't even install v10 again, only God knows why that is... Another annoying stick-it-to-the-customer-and-watch-him-squirm. Or just really shoddy software, not sure which.
Hello everyone,
Thank you all for your comments and feedback.
Miles, please let me assist you.
I am very sorry for all the trouble you had to go through. I will contact our Management team and let them know of the situation so that this does not happen in the future.
Since you have checked your hard drive multiple times for errors, the sector errors are most likely caused by our low-level drivers responsible for disk operations.
I can see that you installed Acronis True Image 2011 Home again, I will send you a private message in a few moments with the a download link for the low-level drivers. If you are still getting sector errors, please collect this report and send it to the support engineer working on your case. I am confident that we will be able to resolve this issue.
Donald,
Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience. Unfortunately I was not able to find any open cases from your current Acronis account, I would really appreciate if you can get back to me with additional information so that I can help you.
If you need additional help or have any other questions, please let me know.
Thank you.
Hi Anton,
I uninstalled True Image 10 and rebooted
I installed True Image 11 and then the SnapManager .msi which I downloaded from your link.
I then rebooted again
I tried loading True Image 11 again, and this type (by unckecking "show this start screen"), I got the main menu of True Image
Clicking on File Backup just spins...
I closed True Image, and then reloaded it again
I clicked Disk and Partition backup and it just spins again (who know what it is doing)
I closed True Image
I then re-ran the setup for SnapAPISetup and removed the software
I then re-ran the setup again, this time with logging. The setup completed successfully.
I then loaded True Image 11 again and clicked Disk and Partion Backup. It sits and there and just spins again.
When will Acronis release a version that works with Windows 7 Professional x64? It appears that (unlike v10), True Image 11 is not really ready to be released yet. I would have appreciated a warning that this product does not work with modern operating systems before I purchased it.
Dear Miles,
Thank you for your message and for keeping us posted.
I entirely understand how upsetting the situation may seem, and be sure that our utmost concern right now is to resolve the issue that you experience to your complete satisfaction. I's like to assure you that Acronis True Image Home 2011 is fully compatible with Windows 7/ I've checked our internal resources and there are no mention of a known issue matching your description.
Thus the situation requires investigation.
Since, I believe, you've followed the instructions sent via PM by Anton and the issue persists, we will need to take a closer look at the problem. Please gather and send us the diagnostic information requested by Anton here. It will help us to localise the cause and find an appropriate solution for it.
Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!
Thank you!
Well...Well...Well.. As it turns out, v11 tries to access all drives when it starts up. When it finds one it can't read, I guess it keeps trying (forever). I had a drive assignment ( See My Computer-Manage-Disk Management) that had no size, and I am not sure how that happened. So I deleted this dead reference, and lo and behold, v11 rises from the ashes.
Note to Acronis Software Engineers: write lower level drivers that don't cack at the first sign of trouble. Perhaps an endless loop to access EVERY drive wasn't such a good idea when your software loads. If you can't figure that out, maybe at least a message letting users know that you are inventorying drives. It would certainly limit the bad publicity...
It's called error handling and I always say, you spend 90% of your alloted development time writing the code and then another 90% debugging and putting in the error handling. Often it's the marketing folks, not the programmers that say too early, " Error, shmerror, it's going out the door tomorrow no matter what. This isn't the sort of software problem that eventually gets worked out and then is gone; it's the sort of thing worked out long ago but can pop again in any new version that has the relevent code rewritten. It's why new-grapdes aren't always upgrades and why extensive beta and gamma testing is so important. some of these relatively simple things get fixed in a correction release between sept and March.
Hi Scott,
Whilst I agree with what you say above in my experience a lot of programmers do not error trap properly.
I forget how many times I have seen something like (psuedo code):
If $month = "Jan" then $monthnumber = 1
elseif
$month = "Feb" then $monthnumber = 2
.
.
.
elseif $month = "Nov" then $monthnumber = 11
else $monthnumber = 12
endif
So if the part of the program that sets up month ever goes wrong monthnumber will always be 12 because it never checks that the last option is "Dec".
The result being that the end user and support staff will never know why.
the last few lines should be
elseif $month = "Dec" then $monthnumber = 12
else
log("ERROR:nnn - Unrecognised month: month = $month")
exit
endif
There could of course be user input at the exit statement and "nnn" for the error identifies exactly where the error message comes from as "nnn" is a unique reference. ("nnn" can be module/line number or what ever but should always be unique)
This is just a trivial example but I think errors like this where everything is not checked absolutely account for more problems than anything else. Along with infinite loops with no time-outs or iteration counters which once hit generate error messages. Calls to OS functions where the calling program effectively looses control should also be timed out etc. etc.
The lack of any useful logging is also a major contributing factor in the length of time it takes to find and resolve issues:
e.g. if you set up a backup in ATIH2011 where the file name is "@task@_@date@_@time@" and do not carry out any validation of the backup when it is created. when you look at the log file you will absolutely no idea of the name of the backup file that was created by the task.
In my book this is unforgivable and an example of extremely bad programming practice and management of standards. I am sure it is a time pressure that causes these issues but that said this sort of thing should be picked up in Alpha testing by the QA team.
I don't disagree.
And one should always be able to escape from any instruction one has issued to a program, there should always be a check to the keyboard buffer for certain keystroke . . . were that it was always so . . .