Unless I did something wrong, restoring is useless
First before posting my question I read this page which almost gave me an aneurysm.
I have a pretty simple setup and request. I have a 240GB SSD that I back up to a 1TB hard drive. I prepared the hard drive by formatting it so it had no files on it at all.
As I went through the initial set up I believe I did everything I had to do to get it set up. Backups seem to work properly. I have it set up so that it creates a backup every two hours.
Okay, so it seems like I'm moving along just fine. Today I decided to re-install Windows due to excessive windows explorer crashing. Every day at least 3 or 4 times.
So once I finished installing Windows I installed the most important couple of apps knowing I had good backups.
I open Acronis and find my backups. I choose the applications I want to rerstore. When done checking them off I click proceed and wait. Looks like everything is working as it should. When done I reboot and to mu surprise find that NONE of the applications are back in the Start menu and when I navigate to the Program Files folder and try to run them from there, most do not work.
What is the point of backing up all of these files if I can't truly restore them so they work.
I understand that applications have appdata files and some additional stuff in the Windows registry, and foolishly I thought Acronis was smart enough to backup and then restore these things. I see absolutely no way of restoring my applications so that they work. I am now past my 30 days so I take it a refund is not forthcoming. But I feel as ripped off as if someone stuck a gun to my head and demanded my wallet.
Yeah I'm angry!!!
Tye problem with what you describe is that that's exactly what I did as far as the backup is concerned. I backed up the entire partition. This was one of the reasons I chose a 1TB drive as the backup drive for a 240GB SSD.
But sometimes you don't want to to restore Windows because of issues you may be having with it. In my case Windows Explorer would crash 3 to 4 times a day and the computer would wake from sleep. So, I wanted a fresh install of Windows. Now even though I don't want to restore Windows I should still be able to restore individual programs to the state they were in when I backed them up including being put back to the start menu. Now in effect I have a bigger mess on my hands because the programs I restored are not listed in the Uninstall or change window. If I go to "Program Files/restored file/restoredfile.exe" Either nothing happens or it gives me an error that some file or other is missing. So I have to reinstall everything individually. What the hell was the point of spending money on this program if it won't do what it was sold as being able to do.
Apple has it nailed with Time Machine. You can restore anything you want. You can even restore your entire applications folder without having to restore the OS.
This is horrible and useless. If you can't restore individual programs there should be a big red warning when you create the backup so as to avoid these problems.
RocknRob,
You cannot compare Time Machine and a ATI. One if for the Apple platform, the other for Windows. In Windows, it is not possible to restore applications independently of the OS: the 2 are thightly linked together at different levels. That is the Windows platform.
There is no way to backup an application and restore it. The only way is to reinstall.
With ATI, most users simply restore the entire system partition with the apps. So, "horrible and useless" describes the situation you are in now, but not the the process of image backup and restore.
If you have a partition backup, simply restore the partition, and reinstall Windows on top of it. If you don't want to lose your recent Windows reinstall, then you will have to reinstall all your apps. On Windows, there is no alternative. Nothing to do with Acronis.
RocknRob,
You cannot compare Time Machine and a ATI. One if for the Apple platform, the other for Windows. In Windows, it is not possible to restore applications independently of the OS: the 2 are thightly linked together at different levels. That is the Windows platform.
There is no way to backup an application and restore it. The only way is to reinstall.
With ATI, most users simply restore the entire system partition with the apps. So, "horrible and useless" describes the situation you are in now, but not the the process of image backup and restore.
If you have a partition backup, simply restore the partition, and reinstall Windows on top of it. If you don't want to lose your recent Windows reinstall, then you will have to reinstall all your apps. On Windows, there is no alternative. Nothing to do with Acronis.
What you say contradicts this which is on the product descroption page. This makes it sound like you can recover anything you need. " All those software downloads and program shortcuts you've added over the years. All the emails and contact folders. With Acronis' patented disk imaging and PC-cloning technology, every bit of information can be restored to its original shape in minutes—without having to reinstall any software application"
This is why I bought the software.
The description is accurate. When you do a full system restore, everything is restored: all working applications; all e-mail; all contacts; all bookmarks; all user preferences; all user data; etc.
You can't select to just restore certain applications and nothing else, because that is not how Windows is designed. That is a Windows issue, not an Acronis issue.