Warning about split archives

Man, was I ever frustrated. I built a new PC and put Windows 7 on it. I took the opportunity to upgrade to Acronis 2010 Home from version 9, concerned that the older version would not run well under 7. I did a TON of work setting up Windows 7 and all my applications. To protect this time investment, I did regular full Acronis backups, six of them in fact. I did not do any incremental or differential backups, just full ones, and I kept my data on external hard drives instead of the internal one. So I went to set up the PC as a dual boot with Windows XP, but I messed it up. I figured no big problem, I'll just do an Acronis restore of my most recent image. That's when the serious frustration began. As soon as the restore started, I got the message:

"An error occurred while opening the file. A possible reason may be poor media quality."

The media was a 1 TB Seagate external drive that I was pretty sure was in good shape. I tried the previous Acronis image and had the same problem. Same prob with the one before that and the one before that. I booted to my Acronis 9 recovery CD and restored a Windows XP installation that had been previously on the computer just because I had some work I needed to get done. It worked fine. I therefore knew there was nothing wrong with the external drive. So today I went to give it it another shot to restore the most recent Windows 7 image. Same prob. Then I searched Acronis's web site for a solution. I found one here: kb.acronis.com/content/10653
That link advocates clicking "Cancel" when you get the error message and then going through the Recovery Wizard again and that it will work the second time around. For me actually it took more than the second time. It finally worked on the 3rd time through the wizard, thank God.

I then immediately did a new backup without splitting the archives. I had split them so that I could copy them to DVDs. Once on DVDs apart from the computer, there's no way they can get infected by viruses.

I really hope Acronis fixes this bug. Perhaps they already have. Not everyone would have been as resourceful as I was to find this workaround. A person with only one computer would not have been able to search the Acronis site. I was able to because I also have a Linux PC. Also, someone less knowledgeable would not have known to search.

I absolutely loved Acronis 9. It was flawless for me. I've been a big advocate of this program for years and have sold numerous copies to customers. (I work in a tech field where we sometimes sell boxed software.) If I hadn't found this workaround, it would have cost me hours and hours of work re-setting Windows 7 up. The purpose of owning a product like Acronis is to avoid that kind of extra work.

Hopefully the bug will be fixed. I was considering migrating to a competing product. However, I much prefer Acronis's interface to its competitor's. I'm going to keep using it at least for now.