Acronis True Image Home 2012 just released
I had huge issues with 2011 and never made it work. It crashed on start-up. However, one thing I will say is that I managed to talk to support via chat a few times quite easily. (about 2 weeks ago). Usually manged to get them and had one on one interaction for literally hours including webex. Thy were in India of course, but written English was flawless. I was working at night which is day in India. Not sure if that helped.
When I gave up, I logged on to chat and asked for a refund. They tried to persuade me to wait for a fix, but I insisted. They ack'd by email promptly and my credit card was credited 3 or 4 days later
So of all the issues that are so eloquently documented here, support and refund was top notch for me. They may be backed up now with 2012, but try the chat service.
One thing not mentioned here is that I do most of my partition image backups from the boot CD and save them on separate drives, including a USB external drive. I do file backups (e.g. data while logged in and I hated chains and finding my backups which were always full backups thank heavens. I'm not even sure what will happen if you try to restore from the CD with chained backups.
Finding those backups with 2011 was a nightmare. They don't exist in 2011's timeline and are very hard to browse unlike 2010. That makes the interface even worse. I don't think they ever considered that in building the new GUI. I certainly don't need the bells and whistles; consolidation; chains or any other of that garbage. Wonder if we'll ever get it back. Drive Image used to be great for XP, although it did not do file level backups which we need these days. That's all I'm looking for, but it seems like Acronis will never restore the features we need. It is too far gone now. Judging by Amazon comments you'd think they would take notice as their business model must be going downhill. Acronis should realize this product is not for people who know nothing about PC's which I think is what they are trying to achieve. Those people would do well to test it well as they might get a surprise if they ever try to restore.
2010 just saved my bacon with a system hard drive failure. I doubt I could trust 2012. Certainly I tried 2011 and it was a nightmare.
Acronis 2011 earned every one of those 1 star Amazon reviews. I downloaded the 2012 trial hoping it was an improvement on the 2011 version. It looks better and I had high hopes, but it appears to be the same 1 star product. It crashed the second time I started it up. It can read the data from a backup of one partition, but not the second. Other times it just hangs calculating the restore time, but never comes back. I just downloaded Norton ghost and if it works, good-bye Acronis forever. What a waste of time and money ATIH has been.
Experienced both of those issues myself. Decided to also move back to Norton Ghost, as a previous poster stated, since it's what I started out using so long ago when I first started imaging and it had always proved reliable. I originally moved away from Ghost to Acronis TI when Ghost started requiring Windows installations for backups but I've since relaxed on the concept when True Image started requiring it as well to run diskless (Recovery Manager) backups. Since they're both on the same plane now that Acronis killed that advantage, at least Ghost offers the concrete ability to tell what your backups are as opposed to this unintelligible list of recovery points that either are or aren't (who knows?) backed up.
Ironically, when attempting to uninstall TI in order to replace it with Ghost I received permission issues stating I had to be an Administrator (I AM) to uninstall the product. 'Turns out you have to locate the Uninstaller in Program Files, right-click it, and "Run As Administrator" to uninstall effectively. I have NEVER had to do that for any other application to date. Just goes to show how amateur the design of this product is and let me say, I've used some heavily "open sourced" products in my day.
I paid double this year for backups (Acronis license--that I don't use + a Ghost license), but I tend to look at it as financial punishment for hard lessons learned. I should have checked out the feedback first and like a hard to give up ex-girlfriend, I kept going back after being burned more than a few times. I'll know better next version. At least she ain't as pretty as she used to be, which helps. ;-)
I just want to say thanks, as I have said before, to all the folks who take the time to share their experiences here. A few minutes reading this forum each morning saved me from upgrading to 2011 (from 2010) and now has saved me from 2012.
2010 works perfectly for me, doing a system disk full image every week and a user disk incremental image every evening. I use my own script to delete older backups. I have seldom needed to restore but when I have it has worked fine.
I've used TI since TI8 and while I don't need to add my comments about the quality of their software and their customer support, I want to add my opinion that it really hasn't changed much over the years. Actually I'd have to say the software quality has decreased over the years, starting I quess with TI9, with each version bringing (1) new bugs in new features, (2) regression bugs in old features, (3) bugs remaining unfixed from previous releases, and (4) a dis-improved user experience. Some of the things I've seen them do are more than startling. And the support quality hasn't changed much over the years; it certainly has not improved significantly. There is the occasional flurry of responses from Acronis support people, mostly routine requests for more information and the occasional promise to pass a complaint or suggestion to the "development team", the majority of which don't seem to go anywhere.
I keep using 2010 because as others have said, it works for me and none of the outstanding bugs interfere. But Acronis isn't likely to see another dollar from me. I wish they cared.
My first experience with Acronis True Image Home was 2010. I was generally satisfied with the product, though I had constant problems with backups being orphaned if I made settings changes and this led me to have to manually manage the regular backups far more than I wanted to. Acronis offered me an attractive price to move to 2011 with the Plus Pack. I jumped on it and found it to be a huge mistake.
The user interface change was ridiculous. I have to echo what others have said... they have dumbed it down too much. What I haven't seen anyone mention is why did they dumb it down? Doing an image restore or disk clone is simply beyond the users that the new GUI is targeting. It is an advanced task. I could see it if they did something radically simple that just works like Apple's Time Machine, but ATIH is too kludgy for a disk restore to be something the average PC user would be capable of. Acronis should forget trying to target complete novices with the interface until they have a software engineering team capable of making a truly simple, reliable product. At this point, I don't think they care. They clearly want to keep software development costs very low and it shows.
I was able to get past the interface eventually, but the other bugs were simply too much and I lost all faith in Acronis. One update to 2011 broke the ability to use unauthenticated SMTP servers. I don't believe they ever fixed it. Another update broke the ability to use Gmail's SMTP server with TLS authentication. It simply crashed the program because some genius programmer at Acronis decided that Gmail's non-standard TLS port of 587 was invalid, which is funny because every single e-mail client I have ever used was able to use the settings just fine. I don't think they ever fixed this either. Integration with the Windows Control Panel was extremely buggy and generally broken. It never showed any of my backups there and oftentimes would lock up the Control Panel when I tried to view it. Building a Windows PE disc was far more complicated than it should be, especially when you consider other software that can build bootable WinPE discs very easily (such as Eset NOD32 Antivirus). One update installation got stuck at 33% and I attempted to cancel it, which of course did nothing. I had to uninstall the product, run the Acronis cleanup utility, make a couple registry changes, and then install the software as new and reconfigure all of my backups again. About the only thing that was improved for me in 2011 was that it seemed to correctly clean up older backups as I told it to and I had to do far less manual management.
As someone else said, ATIH 2011 deserved every one of the 1-star Amazon reviews it received. Heck, it probably deserved many more. When I saw Acronis' upgrade deal to 2012 in my inbox, I laughed. Honestly, I would be surprised if Acronis is around in five years if they continue with these horrid releases.
Until Acronis commits to quality releases, I am done with them. A statement from a VP saying "We hear you" is not enough. I want to see true results. From what I'm hearing about ATIH 2012, it is a release along the lines of 2011: crap.
I contacted the chat service for a refund. There was no issue other than an attempt to get me 'wait' for next release but when i insisted they processed it right away and it hit my cc 3 or 4 days later.
Scott, that was an excellent, concise post. At least let's give Acronis credit for sponsoring a forum that allows them to be castigated like this.
I think this thread is now more of the same. Can I try a tangent?
We are all unhappy with Acronis. 2010 works for me but I manage things manually, much of it from the CD boot. So what are the alternatives. I am, not sure there are really any good ones. Ghost gets almost as bad reviews on Amazon with more 1 star ratings than 4 or 5.
I am just installing Windows 7. Is the built in backup tool flexible enough to give some of us what we want i.e. a simple tool that will take reliable and restorable partion; drive and file backups, perhaps allowing incremental backups. Not sure Win7 has incremental.
If not, anybody got a recommended solution?
Update: 'Checked out the latest version of Norton Ghost due to difficulties experienced with TI 2012. Better, but not by much. Still kind of gets confusing. Did a little more research and I really think EaseUS Todo Backup will recoup a lot of the ex-Acronis users. It's pretty and very straightforward. WYSIWYG which is far more than I can say for TI these days. 'Does the boot manager gig and just works. Oh, and it's FREE.
For a full explanation check out my blog: http://www.nothingserio.us/2011/09/05/acronis-true-image-is-ghost-back-…
I'm not sure if this is allowed (moderator can edit my message freely), but I find out that ShadowProtect Desktop might have just what I looking for. It is quite expensive, but seems to do great job without bells and whistles and do very fast backup/recovery.
Don't worry. Acronis, obviously, never looks at customer feedback. ;-)
I am just installing Windows 7. Is the built in backup tool flexible enough to give some of us what we want i.e. a simple tool that will take reliable and restorable partion; drive and file backups, perhaps allowing incremental backups. Not sure Win7 has incremental.
If not, anybody got a recommended solution?
Windows 7's built-in Backup and Restore is horrible. Forget about it. It's sort of along the same lines as what Acronis True Image Home offers (imaging + file backup), but it has serious flaws in how it handles incremental backups and is unbelievably slow. It also has very little in the way of customization ability.
I've heard good things about something called Macrium Reflect, but I have not tried it myself. YMMV.
We are all unhappy with Acronis. 2010 works for me but I manage things manually, much of it from the CD boot. So what are the alternatives. I am, not sure there are really any good ones. Ghost gets almost as bad reviews on Amazon with more 1 star ratings than 4 or 5.
[...] anybody got a recommended solution?
There you go... As I have repeated tens of times, we are all unhappy with Acronis. We all wish it reversed its down spiral into eventual oblivion... We do.
"But were's the beef?" THIS is the problem. There are bundles of other backup and restore software out there, including Windows 7 backup utility. Problem is, nobody comes out and says: Hey, here is one real good alternative to ATIH!... Nobody that I know of. I, for one, would definitely give it a try.
Even more: It is sad to say, but until the time comes when some competitor shows up with a better alternative, I don't think Acronis will be much moved by our complaints. I hope it does not wake up one day too late...
Sincerely.
One more thought...
It has been said here and elsewhere: The simple fact that Acronis keeps this forum alive and does not interfere with threads such as this one -- where most comments tend to be on the negative side about ATIH -- should be posted to Acronis credit.
I agree. In all fairness, it would be quite easy (and also understandable, I must add) for a moderator from Acronis' to come here periodically and either edit or delete negative comments and/or not allow to fall into discussing the company's competitive products. I praise their attitude on this respect. I just wish they could be more responsive and step in, every once in a while. I believe I read somewhere an Acronis disclaimer that these forums are not being regularly monitored by their people and this might also be the answer for the apparent lack of a more "interventionist" behavior...
Be it as it may, this takes some "guts", and I wholeheartedly recognize that the end result goes directly to their credit, whether it comes from a deliberate policy of the company or a negligent absence of its people...
This said, I wonder if anyone has had any experience with NovaBackup, by Novastor, for example. I happened across this link showing a side-by-side comparison of 10 different backup programs where one can easily get a thorough snapshot of what can be found out there, inlcuding prices, ratings, features and what not. There are also, for each one of them, completely detailed reviews.
http://data-backup-software-review.toptenreviews.com/
I thought it might be worth taking a look at it, if for nothing else, to find out that there are people out there who seem to have a more positive view about ATIH than the average poster in this thread, myself included... In fact, Acronis is listed as one of the four best rated, out of ten titles being reviewed. I wonder what we all may be missing.
Any comments, please?...
I do agree with your comment about them keeping this forum alive. What I don't understand is they don't say very much here at all. Public perception (IMO) is a very touchy topic, people are quick to judge and dismiss. With that in mind, I would at least expect someone from Acronis to try and keep people informed.
As for that website (and many others like it), I am a little sceptical as to thier judgements. Many people today forget that advertising dollars, sponserships, etc many of these site need in order to survive can play a large role in how things turn out in their reviews. Many companies pay for reviews and or have staff (trolls - I call them) that monitor forums, etc to help influence public opintion on products...
After saying all that, I guess I would rather just have something work as promised / advertised...
I give no credit to Acronis for leaving threads and comments like these alone. They aren't moderated simply because they don't pay anyone to do so. If I give Acronis any credit at all, it is for not simply deleting the forums.
It's clear at this point Acronis has cut costs so badly that all aspects of their corporation are showing the result of the overzealous cost-cutting: horrible shoddy releases, updates that sometimes break more than they fix, poor design, generally horrible customer support, unmoderated forums.
Maybe they even cut costs so badly they got rid of anyone who might know anything about these forums such as how to delete them or even that they exist!
As for that website (and many others like it), I am a little sceptical as to thier judgements. Many people today forget that advertising dollars, sponserships, etc many of these site need in order to survive can play a large role in how things turn out in their reviews. Many companies pay for reviews and or have staff (trolls - I call them) that monitor forums, etc to help influence public opintion on products...
After saying all that, I guess I would rather just have something work as promised / advertised...
Agreed. In the past I have spent a great deal of time researching both anti-virus and backup software. I found many sites like the one posted, and each one seemed to have a different clear cut winner and winners of other comparisons having low scores. It is pretty much just paid advertising, not a true review.
The best reviews are customer reviews on places like Amazon or in something unbiased like Consumer Reports.
I don’t necessarily disagree with what you both are saying. I understand that transparency, honesty and ethics are gradually and steadily getting like a lost commodity of a past long gone, which I think is quite sad.
And of course, ideally, besides keeping this place where the users are allowed to vent off some legitimate frustrations with their product, they should also be coming regularly to address at least the more specific and more blunt complaints of their customers who, they should mind, are the only reason for them to have a job, in the first place… But I'm afraid that’s what we have to deal with.
It seems quite odd that Acronis, having achieved a product so much effective at doing what it is meant to do -- backing up and restore -- seems to be unable to give it a better packaging and support it with a better customer service, even if it had to add a few dollars to the final price it charges to their customers. I would definitely be a willing and happy payer...
This said, do you guys have any particular knowledge about any of the titles listed there? Or do you have any good knowledge about other backup-and-restore software that could be fairly regarded as a better choice than Acronis?
Obviously, as a long term user of Acronis, I personally take no pleasure in pointing out those issues which, as we generally agree, seem to be the result of Acronis’ cheap and short sighted policy of cutting costs.
Well for file backup I've used Symantec Backup Exec in a corporate setting and it is, quite frankly, awesome. But it doesn't do imaging like Acronis True Image and its license costs are extremely expensive (~$1000 for the base product). If you want imaging they have Symantec System Recovery. It is also about $1000. There are no upgrade deals for any of this software unless you keep a maintenance (support) agreement, which is usually a few hundred dollars per license. With an agreement in place, upgrades are no additional cost.
For home use, all I've used are Windows XP's ntbackup, Windows 7 Backup and Restore, and Acronis True Image Home 2010 & 2011 (with Plus Pack). ntbackup was the best file backup program of those three, with ATIH 2010 being the best file/image backup. As bad as ATIH 2011 is, it is better than Win7 B&R. I will definitely be looking at other options the next time I need to evaluate my backup software.
I think I would be willing to pay over $100 for a consumer backup product that is 1) reliable, 2) can do both files and images (including file restores from an image backup), and 3) has good customer support. Too many consumer software manufacturers think that you can only sell software between $30 - $80, but if I had a choice between crap between $30 - $80 and an actual working product with good support at $120, I would spring for the $120 software every time. But I guess it's true that the average PC user might not feel the same way. Maybe they could have a crap product at $60 and a good one at $120 to capture both markets. Plus there is the possibility of upselling in that case, provided the $120 product has positive reviews.
I could forgive Acronis for failings of the ATIH products if they had support that could solve issues or resulted in fixes at the development level. It's especially bad that they force you to pay per incident when the incidents are almost always results of issues due to how shoddy of a product ATIH is. It's almost like you have to pay to file bug reports. That wouldn't even be so bad - after all, Microsoft could be accused of the same thing in some cases - if the bugs were actually resolved in updates or subsequent versions.
After reading all these comments, I have taken a serious look at reviews of a few backup products, mostly on Amazon. There seem to be mixed reviews of all products, leading me to believe that all are competing to ruin their products as fast as possible. Perhaps Acronis is no worse than the pack. It fares no worse than others I have checked in terms of reviews. There is one really excellent review that details what to use and what to avoid when using Acronis 2011.
Question: I have many versions of ATI. I had pretty good luck with 2010. The review outlines 2011 faults and good points. Is there anything that improves with 2012 at all from 2011? Are there major new problems over 2011 in 2012?
With 2012 continuing along the lines of the major interface change introduced in 2011, it seems that, if one continues using Acronis, the choice is between going back to 2010 or checking out 2012 (the review of 2011 says never use try and buy) as having possible improvements. Would be very interested in practical comments on how to continue using ATI, since there does not seem to be anything that is rated much better.
I've been using EaseUS Todo Backup for the past few days. Even had to restore from boot disk due to a screwed up disk resulting from canceling a restore and it worked flawlessly.
It may be free but it's definitely not "Clonezilla" free.
Philip,
I would be tempted to give it a try, but I somehow got this idea somewhere that EaseUS Todo does NOT make a recover to a non-operating system. If this is so, it would probably mean that if, say, my hard drive goes kaput I, as an unsophisticated player, would find myself in a little trouble to bring my system back to life, does it not? Hard drive failure is not likely to be the most frequent cause for a system recover, but it does happen and it already happened to me, so I'm a little concerned about that. When it happened, I had no problem whatsoever when recovering into a blank new drive with Acronis rescue media.
And what do you know about the more expensive versions of Acronis, such as Acronis Backup & Recovery Workstation?
Your comments will be appreciated.
Google search with ShadowProtect Desktop. I just swiched to it.
Philip,
I would be tempted to give it a try, but I somehow got this idea somewhere that EaseUS Todo does NOT make a recover to a non-operating system. If this is so, it would probably mean that if, say, my hard drive goes kaput I, as an unsophisticated player, would find myself in a little trouble to bring my system back to life, does it not? Hard drive failure is not likely to be the most frequent cause for a system recover, but it does happen and it already happened to me, so I'm a little concerned about that. When it happened, I had no problem whatsoever when recovering into a blank new drive with Acronis rescue media.
And what do you know about the more expensive versions of Acronis, such as Abronis Backup & Recovery Workstation?
Your comments will be appreciated.
Lin Yu,
I am checking out Easus Todo. It does restore to a blank or previously used Hard drive.
It is very easy to use. All I have done is to download and install it, followed by creating the rescue CD. For good measure I also made its PE rescue CD.
I then created a full main hard drive image and restored it to a swapped in previously used hard drive and followed up with a restore using the PE environment.
I have not had to refer to the Todo documentation at any stage. The straight frward GUI and built in hints are quite adequate to do all that I need to do.
When I have time to do further tests of Todo's backup scheduling and image management I may well make the switch to Todo permanent.I will also have to check out its speed as so far I have been using an elderly USB drive rather than internal or external e-Sata drives.
I've experimented with Easeus as well and found it seemed to work well. However I recall reading in the documentation that it does not copy the disk signature, hence on a bare-metal restore would not restore it. This can impact software licenses tied to disk signature (Adobe comes to mind) and other things I know even less about :)
MKairys,
Thank you for your input. I'm still hopeful about what Philip may be able to say about this, but it seems to me that what you're saying is about the same as what I had said before, that EaseUS Todo DOES NOT recover into a non-working system. Is it not?
As I said before, I am not eager to leave Acronis no matter what, instead, I am frustrated with their apparent detachment (at least to my eyes) from their customers complaints, mainly around the GUI issue, not the reliability of its core functions. Pricing is important, of course, but not the main concern.
I know you can restore to different hardware. http://www.todo-backup.com/products/features/universal-restore.htm
What would I need to do to test? Pop in a new disk and restore to it? I'm currently on an SSD but have some SATA's laying around. What should I look for after the restore other than verifying bootup?
Just a note here.
I cleared out all of Acronis deteris from my hard drive, made sure things were very clean and reinstalled ATI2011 with plus pack.
I set up new backups, one for my data drive (daily) and one for my OS drive (weekly). Data drive backed up perfectly right off the bat. However, the OS drive failed with a read error. I ran diskcheck and found there was actually an error on the drive. After it was repaired, my scheduled backups are running just fine. I have set up the parameters so my backup drive will not be filled up. I plan pick up a couple of extra hard drives and test restore functions, but I have a couple of conclusions from this experience.
1. Upgrading ATI may be problematic.
2. The condition of drives that are being backed up appears to be important.
In some ways, I am glad ATI tripped up on this error, but on the other hand, it seems it should back up the disk anyway. Perhaps sector by sector backup would have worked.
3. Though I feel the interface of 2011 is a real downgrade, I can live with it if the basic functions are still intact.
4. I will test, and will certainly be wary of upgrades in the future. 2012 may be one to skip.
Thanks to whoever pointed out the e-mail notifications. I had never use them before, but it is great to get a notice in the morning about the backups without running ATI periodically to see if the backups are succeeding. This is particularly true since the interface gives you no snapshot like 2010 did (calendar showing the results of backups and the schedule).
No, I'm saying it will, although perhaps with some limitations that would not necessarily be noticed by the average user.
it's one thing to mention alternatives and another thing to be discussing another program. that's best done at whatever forum is set up for that program, so that space here can be devoted to ATI.
I'm in the same dilemma as you all - been using TI Home for years, & very happy with it until TI 2011. (Not risked trying 2012 yet.) I am also tempted to "jump ship", but I'm rather put off by having lots of old TI images on various USB drives that I access now & again. Also - I suspect that I might miss some features that I do particularly like - e.g. being able to explore an image directly, as well as formally mount it. And when I've used it for "bare metal" jobs, using a boot disk, it's worked fine; this part doesn't seem to be broken even in TI 2011; the 2011 PE 3.0 disk has worked very well for me (and of course in that setting, most of the UI criticisms don't apply).
It does also seem to backup & restore quite quickly - certainly MUCH quicker than Paragon HD Manager, which I have also bought but somehow never used much. (Probably mainly because it is SO slow.)
I have been wondering: how does the Acronis "business" version compare (Backup & Recovery 11 seems to be the nearest equivalent)? Someone said they'd be prepared to pay $100 for something that just does what it says, without all this 2011 UI crap - does Backup & Recovery 11 do just that?
I should probably really check out the Backup & Recovery forum, but thought it would be interesting to sound out opinion in the context of this thread.
Simon.
Simon,
Thanks for your thoughts. As I made it clear before, it seems to me that your situation is quite similar to mine. I really am considering trying something else but, as you stated, not having a present and pressing problem with ATIH, I think I can take some time and make sure I won't have to come back to what I have now.
And yes, on a preliminary search I must agree that Acronis B&R 11 has caught my eyes too. I'm now looking for some hands-on opinion before I do the jump...
Please report here any new information you may get about it if you could.