Wow, and True Image used to be so good...

After 5 years using True Image v9 for my backups I finally decided, last December, to take advantage of an upgrade offer that seemed to good to be true. Knowing I wouldn't have time to properly evaluate it, I took a chance on True Image Home 2012 with the Plus Pack for $20. Considering my previous experiences with v9 had been nothing but good, albeit limited to simple backups to locally connected external hard drives, I was confident it was a wise investment.

I could not have been more wrong. If buying True Image Home 9 was the best software investment I've ever made (and given how much use I got out of it that's not an exaggeration), this is probably the worst. The longer I use it and the more features I find myself attempting to take advantage of, the more it disappoints.

From day 1 it was problematic. I began by trying to install it as an upgrade, not realizing that was almost guaranteed to fail thanks to Acronis' complete disinterest in even warning me about what they clearly knew at that point. As a bonus I couldn't uninstall it and it left my old version of Acronis useless. You would think, considering it had been a known problem for some time, they could have at least updated the installer to give you a warning to uninstall previous versions rather than upgrading, but apparently returning customers aren't worth a few hours of developer time.

Eventually, after Windows crashed to the ground while Acronis was sitting crippled and useless on my hard drive, I ended up with a fresh Windows 7 install and a clean install of the new Acronis version. Everything worked fine for a few months - until I decided to actually use the features I bought it for - backing up and syncing folders across my network.

2 weeks ago I finally got a fileserver up and running. It's a simple linux box running Samba. There are 4 shares, all accessed with the same username and password and all providing me with full rwx access to their entire contents. Just to make sure I had any potential permissions issues sorted out I mapped drives to each of them and spent quite a bit of time thoroughly testing everything from folder access to reading, writing, and deleting files.

Then, a week ago today, I changed the destination of my weekly, differential, full disk, backup of my OS drive to one of the shares on my fileserver. At first everything seemed fine. I didn't move the backup files (I left them on my external hdd instead) so it would create a brand new full backup and then ran the job manually. When I came back, the backup had finished with no errors, but it hadn't split it into 4.25GB files like I had it set to (and like it had been doing with no problems previously). It wasn't a big deal since I wasn't planning on burning it to disk anyway.

Then Saturday came and I checked on the status of my Friday night backup and was surprised to find that it didn't run at all. No errors - no messages of any kind. It just didn't run. Once again I wasn't particularly concerned since I had a full backup from Wednesday and almost nothing had changed since then so I put off figuring it out for a couple days. In the mean time, on Monday night of this week, my OS drive crashed and burned.

No big deal. I was confident in my backup but since I was restoring anyway I thought I'd see what Acronis could do so I did a Universal Restore but without providing any additional drivers. Since the only change was the hard drive, from one Western Digital model to another, based on the manual it should have simply loaded the original drivers from the image. Everything seemed fine until I rebooted after it finished and Windows refused to start. Rather than troubleshoot the issue, I performed a standard restore which worked fine as always. I'll have to do some more testing with Universal Restore, but so far it's not living up to the manual, let alone the marketing.

Then I figured I might as well do a complete reconfiguration on my backup and move everything to my fileserver. Rather than trying to hunt down the cause of the previous failure, I simply blew away all the backup and sync jobs and started over. I started with the sync jobs which had worked flawlessly with my external drive. I had no problems setting the first one up - or so it appeared until it actually tried to run. The credentials test passed and the sync job appeared, but nothing was copied to the network share. Then I looked at the log and located the error which listed:

Event code: 0x01910021+0x00040014+0x0000FFF0+0x800704C3

I clicked on the link to get more details and learned that the error was for multiple sync jobs with different credentials. There's just 2 problems there. First off, all the shares on my server use the same credentials. But more importantly, I only had 1 sync setup at that point. As far as I can tell this is nothing but a catch all error that's used when Acronis can't access the share and doesn't know why. At least I hope that's what it is because otherwise it's just plain old fashioned incompetent coding.

After trying each one of my 3 sync jobs separately, different combinations of 2 at a time, and even all 3 together, I figured maybe there was some configuration problem I couldn't see and I should just start over from scratch. I uninstalled True Image, rebooted, ran the clean tool, rebooted again, and then reinstalled both True Image and the Plus Pack. Then I tried to setup the sync jobs again. Same result as before. Every one looked fine when I tested the credentials while creating the job and every one failed with the same completely false error message. Just to make sure I repeated the uninstall/reinstall process again and got the same results. Finally I got desparate and kludged together a solution by creating symbolic links to the shares and syncing through them.

Thanks to the completely inaccurate error messages, not only did I waste a couple hours trying to track down a non-existent problem, I still have no idea what the real problem is. Maybe Acronis doesn't like something in my Samba configuration, but thanks to a lack of proper error trapping in the code it could be anything. More to the point, the entire reason I'm using Acronis is so I have something that just works out of the box instead of spending hours configuring my own solution. If I wanted to spend a couple hours on it I could setup rsync between the fileserver and my computer and have significantly more flexibility. Instead I got the worst of both worlds. All the work of a DIY solution but I still got to pay for Acronis for it.

Once I had that all figured out, I moved on to the backup job for my new OS drive. I set up a full drive backup using a differential scheme set to make a full backup followed by 6 differentials and use no more than 100GB of space. The destination was a network share. Even after my experience with the sync jobs I knew this was possible because I had already gotten it to work once. Then the job got created and it started calculating the completion time. I walked away to let it get started and when I came back almost 20 minutes later it was still calculating. Eventually I had to kill it in Task Manager, after which I opened True Image Home again and thankfully the job was gone.

Unfortunately now Acronis couldn't see any of my drives so I couldn't setup a backup of any kind. I tried installing SnapAPI, figuring it wouldn't help since the drives had just disappeared, then eventually did the uninstall, reboot, clean, and reboot again dance again. But this time it didn't work. Acronis still appeared in the Programs applet like it was installed, but it just made a nasty beep when I tried to uninstall from there. The Acronis folder hadn't been deleted and neither had the Start Menu shortcuts and the virtual devices came back in Device Manager. Eventually I had to reinstall so I could uninstall and finally manually delete the program folder.

I reinstalled 1 more time, was able to create my backup job (which has no problems accessing one of the same network shares the sync jobs can't) and get the initial full backup done. Then I set up the sync jobs, still having to use symbolic links to make them work. And now, thanks to my unwise decision to take advantage of the Online Backup trial offer when I initially installed, I see another bogus error message telling me my subscription is expired and my backups will be deleted in -1 days every time I fire up True Image Home.

Guess what, if none of my jobs are setup to use Acronis Online Backup, and they certainly aren't, that's not an error. It's intentional. And that's not an error message. It's spam. I'm not logging into your website so I can throw good money after bad. I'm logging in because your poorly designed software requires me to if I want to sync a single file on my local network across the connection I had to setup manually so I could route around your malfunctioning code.

I'm just sorry it took so long for me to test out all these "features" because at this point I'd rather just have my money back and wash my hands of the whole thing. But that one's on me for having faith in a company which has clearly ceased to care about the quality of their software and is just hoping to sell me a cloud storage subscription.