Acronis True Image Home 2011 - completely frozen and unusable

Tobias, the problem has been finally acknowledged and it has been fixed in a later build. Just download the latest update from their site. It works fine. But I agree you should not expect their support on this forum. I got a support ticket for the problem discussed in this thread. Got a variety of useless advice from four very polite support engineers, reinstalled several times, installed all kinds of diagnostic stuff, removed competing products that DID work, sent them a lot of log files etc... It has cost me many hours of lost time, lost productivity.

Their fixed build did work, the problem was finally solved. But actually I don't use it anymore. The full product installs loads of stuff I don't need, and this stuff actually gets in my way doing my real work (which is not troubleshooting 3rd party's software). I now only use the bootable version.

But don't get me talking about Symantec. I've used several of their products in the past. Peter Norton sold his name (and his face) to them long ago. His programs have been fine in the past, but have been gradually replaced by buggy bloatware by Symantec. They have a reputation of buying good products, putting a nice yellow box around it, keep selling it until it is incompatible with newer Windows versions, then just drop it without any further support, and start earning money with yet another product they acquired. Their support was much worse than Acronis'. I won't buy nor recommend ANY Symantec product EVER again.

Hello Joost

thank you for the nice words and your honestly thoughts about dealing with Acronis' support and their TI product.

However, I acknowledge your sentiment on Norton/Symantec. I am very well informed about how the word spread on Norton products years ago. I, too, used Ghost V2.x and Norton Commander and ... ages ago and was witness how their new company bloated the products up in a time when PC's could not manage all this new fancy stuff that Window allowed (and their users). And the thing is, today we have 2011 and there is a company that sells its stuff in every TV discounter shop and so on and that sells products that need extra batch files in order too uninstall their product from a modern OS ?!?!

There are users outside who do not know that they need to find a forum, dig in sub forums in order to find with luck an uninstall tool cause the products itsself uninstall routine most probably ruins Windows or even makes it unbootable. That means for many normal users: Their PC gets destroyed and they get stuck in spending endless time they could/must use otherwise.

Anyway,
thank you again and good luck with the 12 man team of Acronis. May be we need a new buyer here too?

Just worked out my problem, my actual back up drive is an eSATA enclosure & 2011 doesn't seem to handle it too well within the app, can navigate backups in windows explorer, but I need to turn it off before loading the app. Trying a back up to it now, disk light flashing so appears to be backing up, I wonder if the scheduled back ups will work?

Paul,
I have used two Thermaltake (docking stations) and one Antec (all combo eSata/USB externals and all have worked without issue in both the 2009, 2010 and 2011 versions of TIH (with XP Home and Win7) inside Windows and when using the Rescue CD. Some brands of hardware might be an issue--especially with the new power savings features. I do make it a practice of assigning higher drive letters to each and I always confirm that they are seen by Windows before starting a backup or restore.

Thanks, just my luck to have an eSATA that TIH doesn't like. Worked OK in 2010, except for the recovery disk didn't pick it up, even with USB (it's a RAID 0, but with only the single disk - could be the problem, Win disk manager has no problem, as does the BIOS obvioulsy, so a flaw with TIH). It's drive 'L' - Wow the back-up is so slow, even on the email-backup, be quicker to create a batchfile to back up on schedule

Thanks, just my luck to have an eSATA that TIH doesn't like. Worked OK in 2010, except for the recovery disk didn't pick it up, even with USB (it's a RAID 0, but with only the single disk - could be the problem, Win disk manager has no problem, as does the BIOS obvioulsy, so a flaw with TIH). It's drive 'L' - Wow the back-up is so slow, even on the email-backup, be quicker to create a batchfile to back up on schedule

If the ati2011 bootcd works with your machine but the windows install doesn't, you can remove ati2011 and go back to 2010 and use the ati 2011 bootCD for restores. That at least gets you covered on both backup and restore. In fact, the ATI2011 bootcd is one of the best ones Acronis has produced and I recommend it for restores regardless of what prior versiion of ATI you mght be using.

Thanks for the advice, will create a bootcd as soon as the mail backup completes - went from 1h16(not responding) to 35mins.