Good Bye Acronis
After having been a very loyal Acronis customer for 7 years I finally had to pull the plug today and rid my pc of all Acronis products. In the early years ATI was a great and fantastic product that, for me, worked flawlessly. Unfortunately their recent release of version 2011 changed all that. It's now a very bloated, slow, unintuative application with an extremely poor user interface. On top of all that, it just does not work. There seem to be missing drivers that will not recognize some modern hard drives, so when you go to restore a system image it won't recognize the original location. This renders the software absolutely useless!
I have switched to Paragon which, like the early versions of Acronis, is a real joy to use.
Paragon has succeeded where Acronis has dismally failed. The topper is - wait for it...... Paragon is totally free! And to top it off even more, Paragon has an incredibly easy to use interface and it's fast. I just restored my system drive in 7 minutes.
So good bye Acronis. I have submitted for a full refund on your TI and DD products.
Gee, I'm surprised my post has stayed up so long. Forgot one more topper. The paid version of Paragon includes disk partitioning, so you only need to buy one product and not two.
Victor,
I am holding off until the next 2011 update before bailing out. I have used several earlier versions, and have 2009 on my XP machine. It has proved to be completely reliable through disk failures and operator (me) stupidity. However 2011 is a disaster, and I will not risk my WIN7 machine with it. At least I can experiment with the Paragon software without additional cost. Thanks for the pointer.
Treg
I don't have TI2011 but my friend uses the basic imaging and recovery with Win 7 with no problems at all. What drives him nuts is the user-interface. After I tried to help him, it didn't make me feel like upgrading to 2011 because of the UI.
Because of this frustration my friend and I have tried the free Paragon and it is a good product but it has a few quirks in the UI although I can dismiss them right now as being a unfamiliar devil. This is where TI has seriously fallen, in trying to make their new release different and improved they have "hidden" the primary functions that should be easily to find and made it less friendly resulting in less confidence. When I'm trying to use a utility program rather than an artsy program I want the common tools and functions staring me in the face!
If you are using the free Paragon remember that it doesn't automatically validate an archive upon creation. Also, you have to to select the option that includes integrity checking (the checksums) into the archive which they say takes a little more time to create the archive. This is the reason I do not consider Windows backup to be a good product - you can't validate an archive although you could use the immediate restore trick like Xpilot does to ensure it is good.
The free recovery environment is Linux so make sure it runs on your machine by doing a test restore. Test restores are advised for any backup product and until you confirm you can restore your system you are gambling.
If you read the Paragon forum you will more or less see the same issues as with TI being reported. I thought one post was interesting, the person retracted all the negative comments he had made about True Image now that he found and corrected the hardware problems with his PC.
There are lots of negative comments about Acronis support. Supporting a product like TI on the PC with all its different hardware and software configurations is not an easy task. It is especially not easy when the problem cannot be readily duplicated - there is nothing harder to fix than a working system. I have absolutely no time for any user who moans about being asked to submit additional information to Acronis to aid in problem resolution. In my years in the computer industry I have seen many cases of very experienced programmers jump through convoluted hoops only to subsequently find the problem was not really a complicated one, it was just that a simple piece of information wasn't provided.
Having said that, there is no excuse for Acronis not to keep a customer informed of the progress or lack of progress on a problem for any open problem report. The worse thing a support operation can do is to let things just slide out of sight.
Over the years and I'm referring back to the TI8/9 era (TI2011 would be about TI14 using the old numbering) there have been numerous complaints about QA and support. I actually believe there has been an honest effort to improve both but it obviously is still not as good as it can and should be. I had hoped with the MVP program and better beta testing the problems encountered with new releases would be fewer but I'm not sure that happened and I also wonder why the UI was not panned right at the start. Maybe it was but Acronis forged ahead with it anyway. There has always been considerably suspicion that TI is driven by the marketing department rather than the engineering department when it come to new releases.
There is no backup and restore program that will run flawlessly on every machine especially since the technology gets down into guts more than typical applications. So find one that makes you happy and confirm that it does really work by doing some test restores.
Just my opinion.
I have bought TIH 2009,2010 and 211 (and plus packs). 2010 was highly flawed but 2011 fixed all issues I had. However, I have finally had to uninstall as Acronis as I have a new PC and Acronis does not support GUID Partition table (GPT) for systems booting windows 7 from EFI (so no MBR and you get a 100mb EFI system partition on the drive)
I know its new technology but it has been coming for a while and we are talking Windows 7 and the inbuilt backup works fine with full system backup/recovery. If the default system works then you would expect something more advanced like TIH to cater for it.
paragon does do it but it doesnt have the non-stop backup which is a great acronis feature. I am hoping that the 2012 version of TIH will be available before I decide where my money goes next and that 2012 does give support for system backups for EFI/GPT
Seekforever - that you for your comments, very well articulated. When I installed Paragon recently, the first thing I did was to backup and test the restore feature. You know, it worked flawlessly, just like ATI did years ago. I had no problems and now am very comfortable once again. You see, I'm the type of user who mucks about with my system every now and then, installing stuff that maybe I shouldn't but I've always been able to restore my system in minutes with ATI. That was until version 2011. Last month I was going along just fine as always, fiddling here and there with my pc, totally confident that if I skrewed things up I can always restore the backup that was made automatically earlier in the day. Boy was I surprised and shocked when I tried to restore and image, only to discover that ATI would not recognize my system drive. That's when ATI let me down big time.
By the way I've looked at the settings in Paragon and it seems "control archive integrity" is checked by default. As to validating the archive - how do I do that with Paragon? In my testing I'm able to quickly restore a system backup without any problems. Do I need to validate? I guess this is a cheeky question on an Acronis forum. I should be elsewhere now, eh?
Ich habe in meiner Firma und im Bekanntenkreis jahrelang Acronis empfohlen und eingesetzt... aber nun ist Schluss.
Die Software ist in der neuen Version einfach misst, kaum etwas funktioniert so wie es soll und einen Ausfall kann ich mir nicht leisten.
Ich bin letzte Woche zu Paragon gewechselt und bin sehr zufrieden...
Good by
Acronis
...
By the way I've looked at the settings in Paragon and it seems "control archive integrity" is checked by default. As to validating the archive - how do I do that with Paragon? In my testing I'm able to quickly restore a system backup without any problems. Do I need to validate? I guess this is a cheeky question on an Acronis forum. I should be elsewhere now, eh?
It probably is a bit cheeky but there is a general backup question involved,namely, do you need to validate. IMO, it is always a good idea because you could be writing an archive on a disk sector that is marginal such that you might have trouble reading it. Personal computers tend to assume things are fine when they write information to disk and only check it when it is read. Another problem you could develop is a bad RAM location or some even more obscure problem so even though you've been successfully restoring archives for a long period of time one day your hardware goes bad and you won't necessarily know it. Of course, if you keep a series of archives and the last one is a dud you do have a fall back position and hopefully anything important will be included.
Note that it is possible to validate an archive and then find it unreadable some extended period of time later. This can be caused by damage to the disk due to head contact or you might have an area that is on the edge for magnetic retention. In other words, the magnetism is sufficient immediately after the writing but several weeks or more later it has faded away too much. No doubt these types of mechanisms are among the thoughts Acronis had when it instituited the automatically validate at a specified interval function.
To validate in the other product you mentioned, you go to the Archives tab and then right-click on the archive listed and select Check the Archive Integrity or you can do it from the Archives entry in the command bar at the top. This is one area I had trouble in - getting my actual archive rather than just Track 0 to appear. I got it to work but I don't know exactly what fiddle caused it to start working.
Were you successfully using TI2011 and all of a sudden it stopped recognizing your drive or was this the first time you had tried to do a restore with TI2011?
Thanks, I've located that function to Check Archive Integrity, seems to work fine in my case. As you mentioned I do keep at least a weeks worth of archives so I feel fairly safe that one of them will restore. I also keep all of my data on separate drives and use PureSync to copy to backup drives. In that respect I'm quite well protected.
As far as TI goes the problem first started when I installed a new HD and put my system on it. The first time I went to restore the system is when I discovered neither TI or DD would recognize the drive even though Win7 did. I jumped through hoops with Acronis and spent many hours back and forth in emails and on the forums for a solution. I had to copy all of the data off of that drive, clean it, re-format and re-partition using Disk Management. I finally got the system back to where it was. Then a week later I went to test the restore again and wouldn't you know Acronis would no longer recognize the drive. It was at that point I gave up.
Just to document the fact that Acronis has refused to give me a refund for both faulty applications. They say it's beyond their 30day period. That's a laugh..... I didn't get a chance to test the restore facility for two months, then found it didn't work, now they won't give me a refund. This is very, very poor corporate policy Acronis. Why can't you own up to the fact that your current product is slightly "lacking" in reliability and performance, fix the problem and give those who want it a refund. That would go a long way to creating more positive customer feedback and goodwill. Now all you've done is create a great deal of bad will. How many people do you think I will recommend your products to?