Are there more dissatisfied users of TI 2010?
Add me to the list of very disappointed ATI 2010 customers. I ran into several show stoppers with only the basics with Win 7/32. I'd heard & read so many nice things about ATI in recent years I decided to try it. YOIKS, what buggy software. I went back to Ghost 14 which works just fine for me. I've been using Ghost successfully for the last 8 years, and am very happy to've gone back to it. It costs $20 more than ATI Home, but believe me it's worth it.
I also had bad problems as reported before. Ureaka I believe I have found the perfect solution. I put ATI 2010 on a BARTPE disk on my windows XP system. By using the Bart disk I have been able to back up the system and data files PERFECTLY and restore them also, but only using the BART disk. Now for the real deal. The same BART disk works PERFECTLY on my wife's VISTA PC. I don't know why but it does and I am now very satisfied with ATI 2010.
BartPE is a pseudo-version of WinPE created by a fellow named Bart in Europe. It uses Windows drivers and various other components and is a stand-alone OS, that is, it doesn't need anything from your PC's OS when it is running.
It obviously has a sufficient driver set included to support the hardware on your wife's Vista PC. The file system for XP or Vista is either NTFS or FAT32 which is are both supported by BartPE so there is no trouble handling the disk structure.
Boy I wish more people would try William Filley's approach! Either a BartPE or WinPE build can solve so many problems, but is does take some effort...
Amen to BartPE/WinPE. I've been using this approach since V9.
It's not a psuedo-version. what Bart Lagerweij created with the BartPE builder is a prog that will build a win disk using win files -- you have to have win installed to be able to build the BartPE disk. Big plus is you can use what rivers you have for win, so if ATI runs under win on your machine, then it will run under BartPE, other things being equal. The same holds for ViastPE except the VistaPE builder comes directly form MS.
BartPE is a pseudo-version of WinPE created by a fellow named Bart in Europe. It uses Windows drivers and various other components and is a stand-alone OS, that is, it doesn't need anything from your PC's OS when it is running.
It obviously has a sufficient driver set included to support the hardware on your wife's Vista PC. The file system for XP or Vista is either NTFS or FAT32 which is are both supported by BartPE so there is no trouble handling the disk structure.
I still say it is a pseudo-version of WinPE but may be more correctly termed a work-alike. It is not a duplicate of WinPE.
From my view, the major difference is that BartPE is based on a XP core (it is made from XP install disk most conveniently) that has to be supplied by the user, while WinPE is based on a Vista core that is supplied by Microsoft via the WAIK. Bart made his version since at the time he did, Microsoft limited who could get WinPE (which is now available to anyone). They do basically the same thing, but a WinPE build made via the Acronis builder supplied with the Plus Pack does not have a "Windows-like" interface when you exit TI, whereas BartPE has a basic "Windows-like" shell supplied. For a WinPE build with graphic shell, one has to use the MustangPE builder, or some others that I am not personally aware of. I have all three, but I prefer Acronis-built WinPE personally. BartPE and WinPE are both basically stripped-down Windows versions that boot off of bootable media and run entirely in RAM. Whatever works is what is important.
I also had bad problems as reported before. Ureaka I believe I have found the perfect solution. I put ATI 2010 on a BARTPE disk on my windows XP system. By using the Bart disk I have been able to back up the system and data files PERFECTLY and restore them also, but only using the BART disk. Now for the real deal. The same BART disk works PERFECTLY on my wife's VISTA PC. I don't know why but it does and I am now very satisfied with ATI 2010.
You may be satisfied, but it seems to me that you're letting Acronis off the hook. You've seemingly given up one of the key features, IMO, and that is TI's ability to restore images from within Windows. This is the reason I bought Acronis in the first place (my first was version7). Sure, rebooting is necessary when restoring the system drive, but it saved me the steps of digging up the rescue disc and going through that routine. It may not seem like much to you, but it is to me.
I just upgraded to 2010. Everything seemed to be going great, even ran faster than 2009. I decided to restore an image (2010), and suddenly, the TI everyone has been posting about reared its ugly head...the system rebooted to restore C:\, started loading The TI environment and immediately rebooted, or at least tried to. It seemed to have hosed my system drive without even getting into its environment. Quite an accomplishment. I inserted my 2009 Rescue Disk, restored to my latest image and am now back in business.
I really don't have time to be Acronis's beta tester, especially on such a notoriously buggy product, so, unless a quick answer pops up, I may well be availing myself of the 30 day money back guarantee.
While you can copy from Win system files while they are in use, you cannot write to them -- therefore restoring a system disk requires booting into another instance of win or into another OS. Even if you start a system disk restore form within ATI, it is going to reboot into another OS to do the restore. You'll find the same with other disk imagers.
While you can copy from Win system files while they are in use, you cannot write to them -- therefore restoring a system disk requires booting into another instance of win or into another OS. Even if you start a system disk restore form within ATI, it is going to reboot into another OS to do the restore. You'll find the same with other disk imagers.
Hi Scott. Sorry if my previous post wasn't clear. The issue is not that TI rebooted in order to restore C:\. As you say, it's always done this (again, I've been using TI since version 7). I'll requote what issues occurred:
"...the system rebooted to restore C:\, started loading The TI environment and immediately rebooted, or at least tried to. It seemed to have hosed my system drive without even getting into its environment."
IOW, TI 2010 refused to boot into the Acronis environment. C:\ was not restored, rather, the C:\ partition was hosed, requiring me to boot from a TI 2009 rescue disk (thereby restoring a 2009 image).
I had forgotten to create a 2010 Rescue disk, which may have worked, but the point (for me) was that TI 2010 didn't work as designed. It did not leave windows, boot into Acronis Environment, restore C:\ partition and boot back into the restored C:\. Instead:
1) It did initiate the restore from windows (as expected)
2) It did leave windows
3) It attempted to load the Acronis environment
4) It failed to load the environment, rebooted, froze at POST.
5) I had to manually shut down the system. Further booting attempts failed with no error messages.
I hope my post is more understandable now. I will likely give this another try, but after reading of all the issues, I'm not hopeful. I will post to the main forum in hopes of receiving a solution.
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Relevant Specs: Win7u 64
Manually uninstalled (via CP) TI 2009
Turned UAC Off
Removed all entries from registry (Acroniscleanup.exe returned 'Wrong OS' error)
Renamed TI 2009 Dir on Apps partition
Installed 2010 as Admin
With the statement "You've seemingly given up one of the key features, IMO, and that is TI's ability to restore images from within Windows. This is the reason I bought Acronis in the first place (my first was version7)." there is a failure to acknowledge as valid any other way of working with TI. This is just one opinion of one way of working with TI. There are other valid approaches and opinions - I don't think it's a matter of letting Acronis off the hook for these other users. But TI should work in a way that it has worked for you in the past. I can see why you would be frustrated.
With the statement "You've seemingly given up one of the key features, IMO, and that is TI's ability to restore images from within Windows. This is the reason I bought Acronis in the first place (my first was version7)." there is a failure to acknowledge as valid any other way of working with TI. This is just one opinion of one way of working with TI. There are other valid approaches and opinions - I don't think it's a matter of letting Acronis off the hook for these other users. But TI should work in a way that it has worked for you in the past. I can see why you would be frustrated.
I see no invalidation of his methods in my comments, but if my post seemed to imply that his approach was invalid, that was not my intent. And, it's not a matter of how it worked for me in the past, but a matter of how Acronis TI is designed to work and how it is advertised to work (and, indeed, has worked since version 7 or earlier). My point was: If I can only restore an image via the rescue disk, Acronis TI is not working as designed. Thanks for your comments.
Why anyone would put up with such buggy software when there're competitive products that don't have these problems is unfathomable to me. Fry's has Ghost 15 on sale for $0.00 after rebates, and it works perfectly with Win 7/32 for me. I've been using Ghost for about 8 years, but decided to try ATI after having read good things about it in years past. I haven't seen any mention of it in the trade mags recently, and now I know why! Apparently Acronis' management has gotten greedy and decided to cut back on quality assurance and support, and now they're paying the price. Most unfortunate. The school of hard knocks is a good teacher, but it's a very painful one for those (like Acronis) who have to experience it. From what I've read in this forum this has been going on for at least a couple of years, so I'm inclined to believe they're not only greedy and foolish, but slow learners as well. :-(
It is advisable to make a rescue CD, even if intending to subsequently use the ASRM for recovery, as the rescue CD will let you know if the Linux drivers will boot your system correctly. If they do, then the ASRM will (should) work correctly. If the rescue CD fails, then the ASRM version will probably not work as expected also.
Just a heads up.
Wayne-
It is VERY CLEAR that you are unhappy with Acronis. Ghost is perfect, and never has let it anyone down, and Symantec must be the veritable model of ideal development of software and a software company. Thanks for letting me know. I have no idea, in this case, why there would be any competitive products in disk imaging at all. I also have no idea why you insist on repeatedly posting in these forums. Surely the Ghost forums could use your experience. Or maybe no one on those forums needs help, since Ghost has never failed a single user.
All hail the god Symantec Ghost, must be holy holy holy.
Lets all bow down to the software giants who ate up all their obviously useless competitors.
I wonder why I used Symantec products once ( and only once). Obviously 30 years in programming has warped my poor soul into using all software that is inferior. Obviously my soul needs cleansing but until then I'll continue to believe in Christ and stick with Acronis and endeavour not to go on other companies forums to slag them off even though I know they were rubbish. Ho hum.
Colin makes an excellent point. An additional reason for making a BootCD is that, if your hard disk fails, you won't be able to run ASRM and you will need the BootCD to do a restore.
All hail the god Symantec Ghost, must be holy holy holy.
Lets all bow down to the software giants who ate up all their obviously useless competitors.
I wonder why I used Symantec products once ( and only once). Obviously 30 years in programming has warped my poor soul into using all software that is inferior. Obviously my soul needs cleansing but until then I'll continue to believe in Christ and stick with Acronis and endeavour not to go on other companies forums to slag them off even though I know they were rubbish. Ho hum.
Hmm, strike a nerve did we? I posted two notes describing my problem with ATI 2010 (latest version downloaded), but apparently you and the prior poster didn't see them. Not surprising because after 3 weeks nobody (and that includes Acronis) bothered to reply to them.
1) I'm no fan of Symantec. I bought ATI (for $50) because in years past I'd heard good things about it and would like to decrease my dependence on Symantec, who like you say gobbles up good companies and mucks up their products (viz Partition Magic). I went back to Ghost because I know I can count on it. If you or any one else know of a better backup and recovery product, let's hear about it - these are the two I'm familiar with though at present.
2) When I tried to restore my systems with the full boot CD, the result was completely inaccessable hard drives (I have two with 3 partitions, one with XP, two with Win 7/32). Turns out the boot CD marked both HDs as owned by Linux and neither the XP install CD nor the Win 7 install DVD would touch them. I tried deleting the partitions, recreating them, and reformatting them, but ended up using FDISK (which I hadn't seen nor heard of for the last 10 years) to recreate and remap the drives.
3) When I finally got XP and Win 7 reinstalled on 2 of the 3 partitions, I reinstalled ATI (yes I downloaded the latest version) and this time I tried restoring the backup of the 3rd Win 7/32 backup. It restored it, but it wouldn't run very well because it had changed the drive letter from H: to C:, causing most applications not to work. All attempts to change the drive letter back to H: failed because somehow the Control Panel's Administrative Management, Disk Management would let me change the letter back, even though I could find no evidence it was in use.
When one buys backup and recovery software they need something they can rely on when Murphy strikes (as he loves to do with computers). Prior versions must have been religiously wonderful to cause your intense loyalty to Acronis, but I have to tell you this is the buggiest least reliable piece of software since release 19 of OS/360 for mainframes came out in 1973 when I was a systems support programmer (I've also been a software developer, systems engineer, and software architect).
When I was supporting mainframes, I made a test bucket for every major bug I ran into and ran it against every new release that came out before I put it into production. Had Acronis bothered to do that, they wouldn't have all these complaints. Add that to the fact that they don't adequately support those reporting bugs, and you have the current situation. Most unfortunate. I bought ATI 2010, and am making strong efforts to make it work as advertised, but it sure is an upstream swim. It has to work on my test machine before it goes on any of the others I have though, and at the current pace of things, it's not easy to see the light at the end of the tunnel. :-(
It is advisable to make a rescue CD, even if intending to subsequently use the ASRM for recovery, as the rescue CD will let you know if the Linux drivers will boot your system correctly. If they do, then the ASRM will (should) work correctly. If the rescue CD fails, then the ASRM version will probably not work as expected also.
Just a heads up.
Thanks, Colin. The reality is that I merely forgot (as mentioned), but do recognize the value (necessity) of a rescue disc. Fortunately, I had a few 2009 RDs to bail me out. That said, I downloaded the correct (win7 compatible) file to 'clean' 2009 off of my HD, ran it and re-installed 2010 with the same result:
Initiating a restore of the system drive from windows results in TI rebooting (as expected) into it's environment (with an error message beforehand, which I will capture on next try), but a few seconds into the TI environment, the machine reboots, locks after POST. I believe this error can be resolved (hopefully). I will, when time permits, post a new thread.
The facts, however, remain. ATI is not what it used to be, and QC is greatly diminished, almost to the point where one could believe that Acronis is releasing products to the public with the intent of letting the public pay for beta testing an incomplete product. This is the same road Norton (Symantec) took so many years ago, and they are still paying the price for it. To this day, I refuse to buy any Norton (Symantec) products (incidentally, I used Norton Ghost for many years...up until Ghost 2000.).
I hope that this is not where Acronis ends up. I have been a loyal ATI and DD user (read paying customer) for many years now (since 2003), and if these issues continue, I will likely find a new imaging program. Not exactly what I want, but I have systems to maintain, and if Acronis is unable or unwilling to meet my needs, I'll find a company who is. And it's not like Acronis is inexperienced at releasing a quality product with minimum bugs. They've done it before, they can do it again. It's my hope that they do. And perhaps they could fix the Rich Text Editor as well :-\ . Editing out the double quotes is becoming quite tedious. .
Wayne,
Strike a nerve?, nah, not at all. Guillan Barre Syndrome ate most of mine away.
When I supported mainframes, super mini's, micro's, then PC's(the most crap of them all!), I/we did the same as you of course. We used to try and 'break' each others programs and systems (it wasn't called beta testing or anything in particular as far as I can remember then). And probably 85% or more of application and system control software was to do with validation and exception handling - great fun.
Do you honestly think that in any software house does not do the same, including Acronis? No one writes successful commercial software without all of the necessary procedures, from design to implementation?
The big difference between your mainframe example and now is that there is absolutely no correlation to NOW - the 'old' situation was that you had a specific environment that your software would run within; the 'new' situation is that you can never ever create every environment it will run within.
Would be interested in your comments
Bin,
Lots of interesting food for thought in your post. In a lot of ways comparing today's PCs to the old mainframes is like comparing the old Sputnik era rockets to today's space shuttle, since the technology has changed so much. However I think there're enough posts here re the Linux boot disk and ATI bugs with Win 7 that I'm forced to conclude that if these two things were tested with ATI 2010, it must've been done by retards! One of the things that I've marveled at is how many programmers don't have a good sense for testing. Either they lack the ability or the motivation in too many cases. The design of ATI is very impressive to me, but the testing with at least the 2010 version was obviously lacking in so many ways.
PCs in many ways are more complex, but in many ways they're much simpler too because they tend to be single user machines, where with mainframes we had thousands of online users, rooms full of disk drives, and a pretty good variety of devices attached. Out of all those online users, it was tough to guess how they'd do things, but we somehow managed to make it work. When I went to Windows 7, I throughly tested all my apps and had them working successfully before migrating. I didn't have ATI at the time, and it never occurred to me that a single $50 purchase was going to cause me so many headaches (boy was I ever wrong about THAT).
One of the things that seems to happen often as small successful companies achieve success, renown, and rapid growth is that extra levels of management and bureaucracy creep in, and the people in top management tend to lose touch with the technical folks. Top managers are often egotistical salesmen with good people skills who think they can sell anything. They get greedy and want to cut expenses and boost profits as much as they can. I've seen it happen time after time in numerous companies I could name and I'm sure you could too. I fear this is what's happened with Acronis, but I'd love to be proven wrong. I've stressed ATI's competition because when management loses touch with its technical people, it does understand losing market share to its competition.
To get really philosophical, sometimes I think success is harder to deal with than failure. The old expression "trial and error" is testament that we all fail and pick ourselves up. But when somebody is extremely successful, it's hard not to get the "big head" and lose perspective.
Getting back to the practical aspects, you rely on backup & recovery software to get you out of trouble when it happens, not create catastrophic disaster from significant problems. When ATI marks my HDs in such a way that neither my BIOS, XP's install CD, nor Win 7's install DVD can work with them, that's unforgivable. There've been a lot of posts about doing restores with WinPE, BartPE, or under Windows, but that's not a solution either because when I did my restore under Windows, it changed my drive letter (from H: to C:), causing most of my apps to fail. I tried booting from the original Acronis install CD to do a restore, but it took 6 hours to restore about 30 gig. Assuming it was a driver/error recovery problem, that's when I created the boot CD. Since my backup drive is USB attached (not to mention KB, mouse, and other things), I ended up with the Linux based restore CD. It cut the restore time dramatically, but then it caused me to have to waste a weekend until I finally recovered using FDISK (talk about ancient software).
I don't know how much of the above philosophy you bargained for, but you did ask for my comments!
Hi Wayne, I wasn't bargaining for anything really but your reply is long and I need to break it down a little before I reply in full if thats ok - and I will shortly.
I am impressed with your comments though which are constructive and I understand totally (I think!).
You are conversing with a 49 year old long haired rock loving disabled x programmer by the way! - not a man in a suit and tie, purely technical is me. who wanted to produce top notch software but really didn't give a sh** about managers or even about what it was the end users business was as long as what my programs did what they said they wanted - users are oblivious to anything other than what the facilities the application provides for them at face value!
Fair enough, but you understand I was never interested in anything other than the software I was writing?
Will come up with a better response in a bit ok Wayne
Hi Wayne - as not promised but said I would
The first thing that stands out is your use of the word 'retards'. I am no lover of the 'polital incorrect' crap but it is a big insult to use such a word - may be I should have been a diplomat instead of a doormat! Like I intimated before (or thought I did), testers are not usually booster rocket scientists.
I don't share the comparison of sputnik to space shuttle but I get yor drift. I have never come across a programmer who does like to test his or her own 'finished' product or to have it tested by anyone - my heart was always in my mouth but fixing stuff and making improvements made up for it - all part of the process. I know for sure from personal contact with Acronis programming and development staff that they test on all sorts of users PC's.
I know that mainframes could handle thousands of users but not in the same way that lets say a DEV VAX could handle several hundred users - the differences being that the mainframe needed operators to manage mass storage and printers and bla bla whereas a VAX required no operator at all and just sat in a corner while four or five hundred users could use interactive screens to access their very own running programs. In a nutshell, mainframe was batch program requests, VAX was interactive on line access - then wonderful world of distributed systems came next and DECNET meant we had more computing power without the need for a building to house a mainframe! Good stuff.
Small business to large, failure (or just hanging in there) to success, is a difficult business in itself yes. From small it feels like a family, everyone treats each other like brother and sister, all smiles but lots of hard work. Then the pressure of expansion comes gliding in and its great at first - loads of work and bonuses and wow isn't this great. Even though sometimes you are working 70 hours a week. Then you need more staff to handle the calls because programmers are far too busy, you need more secretarial staff to handle the correspondense, you need customer support staff to take enquries, and before you know it you have three times more people than are actuallly doing any work that is bringing money in!
A small software house I worked for, for five years, started out as five people. I joined and there were 15 of us, 8 of us were programmers including the Managing Director/Owner. When I left, the staff numbered nearly 60, we still only had 8 programmers and I was one of them but got ill and had to finish but the company had changed from software house to simply tech support - in a way I am glad I got ill !
FDISK - oh blimey, that brings back some nice norrid memories. Never mind Bill Gates getting slagged off for Windows 3.bla bla to Vista, what about MPM?, the multi user op system. Bloody nightmare, but CPM was ok and you could edit CPM easily too - those were the days!
But back to what you need well, I don't know because all the CD's I have work and I know nothing about building different sorts of boot disks. But Colin and others most certainly will.
This thread makes my head spin, but sonce Acronis seems to be trying to slog thru it I'm gonna add my comments. I have used Acronis since probably their inception, what, 10 years ago? Used it first to backup & restore the drives in my Linux-based SOHO server. Eventually I migrated to ATI7 which I used for a lot of years without upgrading.
Subsequent to that I have upgraded a few times, more to stay "current" than to get new features, though recently the Universal Restore feature has my full attention (restore a backup from a failed computer to a new computer with different hardware).
None of the other features of ATI do a thing for me as they all involve some sort of automation which I don't trust, and in fact I do all my backups by booting from an Acronis boot CD and not Windows, not ever.
My wish is that Acronis would come-out with a plain-vanilla ATI that does imaging from a boot disk, period. One that works with any images from ATI v1.0 to ATIH2010 and beyond. It's for disaster recovery, in the event of a catastrophic hdd failure, the most common failure there is.
My brain hurts from all the feature-creep, and the many, many "your backup is corrupt" problems (even when I verified them initially) that I've suffered, especially in the last few revisions of software.
OK, after reinstalling ATIH 2010 again, I still have the same issues and more. They are:
1) Acronis will not re-boot into its environment from Windows, and, after its unsuccessful attempt, the system freezes. (i.e., when Acronis reboots to restore system drive).
2) ATIH 2010 requires me to activate with my 2010 and 2009 serials each and everytime I run it.
When booting from the rescue disc to perform a system drive (C:\) restore, ATIH 2010 fails in the following manner:
1) In the Acronis environment, ATIH is slow to respond. One would expect such environments to be uncumbersome and responsive.
2) When choosing the image to recover, ATIH 2010 asks for volume one in the set. The chosen image is actually one whole image on the HD and has no subsequent volumes. I must browse to the image and choose it. ATIH 2010 will then recognize it as a single volume image. After choosing, the browse window doesn't quite close out. Its fragmented remains block the view, requiring me to move the window around to 'refresh' the screen.
3) ATIH 2010 refuses to restore the image to the partition I specify. Instead of restoring to the 1st partition of the HD (where I've always had it), it restores to the last, unallocated partition. Nothing I do will cause ATIH 2010 to restore the image to the partition I choose. I deleted the erroneous partition ATIH created and then directed ATIH to restore to the desired partition. It simply restores to the same partition, user specification be damned. Subsequently using a 2009 rescue disc to restore a 2009 image to the desired partition is immediately successful.
There are likely more issues, but if ATIH 2010 is this blatantly buggy months after its release, it's not a program I'm interested in. I've applied for a refund, and it's allegedly being processed.
I've been a satisfied user of versions 7-2009 (skipped v. 11), but the honeymoon's over. I'm content with using 2009 until it no longer supports my controllers (yes! In spite of what Acronis tells you, 2009 works perfectly fine in Win7...64 bit, no less).
I'm looking into Shadow Protect. When the time comes for me to replace 2009, it's unlikely that I'll do so with an Acronis product.
I'd be interested in hearing the make, model of the PCs that are having all this trouble or the name of the motherboard if a corner-store/self-assembled PC.
My friends and I run various versions of TI up to TI2010 without any grief on corner-store or self-assembled PCs typically with Asus motherboards but also a HP and Toshiba notebook. Granted we all appear to only do full images of C (XP thru W7) which are created within Windows and restored usually with the process started in Windows with the obligatory reboot into the Linux recovery environment.
So far issues that have caused us to come unstuck are: 2 bad HDs (area where archive stored causing "corrupt" msg), 2 RAM problems and a flakey SATA cable. The RAM and SATA cable were caught in the verify stage and the bad HDs required reverting to an older image for restore.
I agree with the insidious feature creep but would anybody care to name the products that have reduced the number of features in each new release? You may not like it but that's the way marketing and attempting to take market-share works. You don't have to use the features especially if you are running from the rescue CD only.
None of the above means that Acronis is doing an great job on quality control but there are lots of us who use the product without any problems. IMO, they lack in this area and they would do well to think about dumping the Linux rescue environment although it is a lot better now than it was prior to TI2009.
Just started using TI Home 2010 this week on my Windows 7 system & it's been fine, though I only do full backups with it. It's the only disk backup solution I've used which actually 'remembers' that my 'System Reserved' partition must be 'active' and the main partition 'not active'. Both Macrium Reflect and Paragon get it the wrong way round during the recovery process. Result = system won't boot. So that's a big plus for TI as far as I'm concerned.
If I've one complaint it's the somewhat challenging process required to create a TI/WinPE boot disc, starting with a ridiculous 1.5GB download of the WAIK just to create a boot CD many times smaller than that! I realise a ready-made WinPE-based TI boot disc wouldn't suit everybody but it would be appreciated by those for whom such a thing was sufficient if Acronis made one available to it's customers. I know their are licencing restrictions and all that, but Acronis' main rivals make WinPE creation much easier - often involving nothing more than downloading an ISO and burning it to disc.
I've been a satisfied user of versions 7-2009 (skipped v. 11), but the honeymoon's over. I'm content with using 2009 until it no longer supports my controllers (yes! In spite of what Acronis tells you, 2009 works perfectly fine in Win7...64 bit, no less).
I'm looking into Shadow Protect. When the time comes for me to replace 2009, it's unlikely that I'll do so with an Acronis product.
I would agree with the above, I have used most versions through to and including TI 2009 and I still use 2009 for Win7 64 bit - faultless. Where I would differ is that if I had to ditch Acronis then I would just use the backup utility that comes with W7. I use this utility as a an added addition to my Acronis backups now and I find it too works flawlessly every time - and it's free.
Here’s my current configuration:
Motherboard: Biostar TA785G3
CPU: AMD Athlon II X3 435
RAM: 2 GB DDR3 1600 (Corsair)
HD1: 10,000 RPM Western Digital 36 GB IDE (WD360GD) – single partition with Win 7/32
HD2: 7200 RPM Maxtor 6L100P0 SATA 100 GB – 2 partitions:
1 with XP Home SP3
1 with Win 7/32
3 DVD drives, 2 IDE, 1 SATA
Device Mgr says all my devices are working properly.
Win 7/32 performance index 4.3 (would be higher if I had a discrete graphics card).
Syba PCI card to allow connection of the 2 IDE DVD drives.
Which drive letters are assigned depends on which system is booted.
There is no overclocking nor heat problem. According to Speedfan, the highest temp in the box is 47 degrees C. It gets up into the low 50s when I run intense apps, but that's the highest I've seen it get.
This system worked flawlessly for a month before I installed ATI 4/28.
The marking of the HDs as owned by Linux was definitely done by the emergency boot CD.
However when I reinstalled Win 7 with ATI and ran the restore under Windows 7 to my H: partition where I'd had a good working copy of Win 7/32, ATI changed the drive letter from H: to C: rendering most of my apps unusable. Then the Win 7 Administrative Tools applet's Disk Management refused to change the drive letter back to H:
Obviously the Linux based restore CD is responsible for marking the HDs Linux owned, but doing the restore under Windows for my H: partition didn't work either because of the changed drive letter. Eliminating Linux from the picture would obviously help the 1st problem, but not the 2nd. :-(
The fact that I didn't have Win 7 on the C: drive could well be important here. I hope this helps.
Faust Wrote:
I would just use the backup utility that comes with W7. I use this utility as a an added addition to my Acronis backups now and I find it too works flawlessly every time - and it's free.
That's a good thought. To be honest, I haven't really considered Win7's backup utility to be a serious contender, but given your remarks and your extensive use of ATI, I'll definitely have to give it a shot, but have a few questions if you don't mind:
1) How long have you been using Win7's B/U util?
2) Have you done many restores from the W7 images?
3) Any complaints or negative comments at all?
As an unrelated question, does anyone have issues with the post editor here double quoting? Seems like every time I quote someone, I have to delete extra quotes in preview multiple times, and quoting only part of the message is impossible unless I do it manually. For example, here, I had to reply rather than quote and just insert my own quotes.
Thanks...
Quotes work, so long as you don't preview your post.
The workaround at the moment is after previewing, post, then edit and delete the duplicate quote.
This has been reported to the webmaster previously.
I have been a happy Acronis TI user since version 7. I have successfully restored partition images over the years and Acronis TI has never let me down. Currently I am using TI 2010 on a Win 7 (32 bit) system. Back ups work fine but one "feature" that really got me interested in upgrading to TI 2010 was Non stop backup. What I didn't realize from the web site information was that I could not use this feature to backup to a LAN attached hard disk. I bought a few terrabytes of hard disk on a NAS (Raid 5) unit and assumed I could use Non stop Backup to this. Unfortunately this was not the case. I have to use this feature with a locally attached drive.
Can anyone explain why it is not possible to use Non stop back up to a NAS device? It seems to me to be of little point to back up to a local hard drive. (With the price of hard disks so cheap, I may as we buy another disk and mirror the first hard disk.) Any thoughts on this issue would be appreciated.
I don't know why NAS devices are not supported other than they can be slow if on a 100Mbps network and the files are large.
I don't share your view that there is "little point to backup to a local hard drive". A second physical drive offers considerable protection even if not ideal. Most failures are in the drive itself not the controller so even if there is a common point of failure it isn't a common one. Non-stop backup, IMO, is for those sudden failures such as power going off on a non-UPS powered machine or a user error or a failure before the up-to-date image is created; I wouldn't consider it a replacement for making images at a suitable interval but that's my view. To be clear, I don't use it and don't feel it offers me anything but overhead. I'm from the old-school and have learned to save my files at suitable times when working on something important/complex.
BTW, a second internal HD is my primary backup device but I do copy files off to an external at various times. It has never been a problem
Faust Wrote:
I would just use the backup utility that comes with W7. I use this utility as a an added addition to my Acronis backups now and I find it too works flawlessly every time - and it's free.That's a good thought. To be honest, I haven't really considered Win7's backup utility to be a serious contender, but given your remarks and your extensive use of ATI, I'll definitely have to give it a shot, but have a few questions if you don't mind:
1) How long have you been using Win7's B/U util?
2) Have you done many restores from the W7 images?
3) Any complaints or negative comments at all?
As an unrelated question, does anyone have issues with the post editor here double quoting? Seems like every time I quote someone, I have to delete extra quotes in preview multiple times, and quoting only part of the message is impossible unless I do it manually. For example, here, I had to reply rather than quote and just insert my own quotes.
Thanks...
I have used the W7 backup utility since RTM date and I have done about four complete restores with it. Absolutely no problems whatsoever and nothing negative to report - well except the first full image does take a little bit longer to do than Acronis.
Faust Wrote:
I have used the W7 backup utility since RTM date and I have done about four complete restores with it. Absolutely no problems whatsoever and nothing negative to report - well except the first full image does take a little bit longer to do than Acronis.
Thanks for the feedback, Faust. I'll be looking into that. Nice to have additional options.
In my professional opinion Acronis True Image Home 2010 is junk. I full intend to ask for my $50 back.
My old tried and true Acronis True Image 9.0 works great. I have NEVER had any problems with it. It just works. I've done complete system restores several times over the years for one reason or another, and it always works fine (albeit very SLOWLY of course, but hey, at least it WORKS).
Acronis True Image Home 2010 however....
I have been struggling with it for the past MONTH, and I'm no inexperienced newbie either. I've got 35+ years experience in the industry. I'm considered an expert at operating systems, emulation and networking software in general, both personal computer and mainframe. (I've been writing software on Windows since Windows 3.1, since before there was an Internet. Before that I designed/developed microprocessor and mainframe operating systems at the board level.) I only mention all this so you can know I'm not just some "Dumb Windoze User" that doesn't know what the frick they're doing. I KNOW what the frick I'm doing.
And I ALSO know, after having struggled with trying to use it for the past month, that Acronis True Image Home 2010 (on Windows 7 Ultimate x64) is pure JUNK. 100% pure unadulterated JUNK.
"Compute with Confidence" my arse.
This is sad. Acronis USED to make a fine product, but each new release became bigger and more bloated than the previous one, until today, it's the biggest piece of junk ever.
I've been a loyal customer since about 2003 (possibly earlier; I can't remember) but no more. I don't intend to EVER purchase another version of Acronis EVER AGAIN, and I will be sure to recommend to all of my customers and friends to STAY AWAY FROM ACRONIS.
Do not bother replying. There's is NOTHING you can do to repair the situation. There is NOTHING you can do to win me back. As soon as I became unable to rely on my backup software to actually backup/restore my data, that was it. That's the moment you lost me as a customer. In this game -- in the game of System Backup Software -- you get ONE STRIKE and you're out. I cannot risk my data on a company the provides UNRELIABLE backup software. I simply can't. You've lost Acronis. Deal with it.
I'm too tired and frustrated to list the many things I've tried and didn't work (or which would work one time but not the next). The straw that finally broke the camel's back was after MANY attempts -- choosing various different time points each attempt (sometimes the same time point several times just in case it decided to behave different like it did before) -- being unable to restore my system from backup.
Let me say that again: I was uanble to restore my system.
I've spent an entire MONTH trying to get my new system setup and it's all been wasted thanks to Acronis. I've got to start over. An entire month of effort wasted. Gone.
Thanks for NOTHING Acronis.
Sincerely,
A *VERY* unhappy FORMER customer,
"Fish" (David B. Trout)
fish@softdevlabs.com
fish@infidels.org
http://www.softdevlabs.com
Great rant; I enjoyed it. Thanks! Hope you feel better too!
What product are you going to use next...?
What product are you going to use next...?
True Image 2011 :)
Hello David,
Just a couple of things - first though I can well understand your frustration after spending so long getting your setup just right. Do you not use the backup utility that comes as standard with W7, full images that is? I use this utility now on a schedule as a backup to my Acronis backup, sort of fall back position if you see what I mean. I have done a couple of restores with the Windows utility and it's worked like a dream.
On the Acronis side of things - I have used the trial version of Acronis 2010 and found that worked fine too on my HP Quadcore machine, no problems at all. My regular Acronis product is the 2009 version and since they fixed the not mounting issue for 64 bit I find that 2009 is the most stable and fast version of Acronis I have ever used, so my thought was why pay for yet another version when what you already have works just fine.
>use the backup utility that comes as standard with W7
Thanks for the reminder that this exists. I've been meaning too to make a "System Repair Disc" which it seems will allow one to restore from an image file that was made w/W7 Backup.
I'm going to give it a try (on my lone Windows 7 PC). :)
I for one, and DONE with TI. The biggest issue I've had is with the creation of the boot media (both CD and USB). I worked poorly in TI 2009 and works even more poorly (actually, not at all) in TI 2010. You come to this support site and you get two pages of required DOS commands from Acronis to try to make the program recognize that you DO in fact have a hard drive installed in the PC, and a long winded explanation as to why this is happening. Of course, it's all the PC we're running!
In the meantime (I"m running Win7) Windows creates a start-up CD and it works, Partition Wizard creates a start-up CD and it works, Active@KillDisk creates a start-up CD and it works, Active@DiskImage creates a start-up CD and it works. But, according to Acronis, the inability for TI to create a usable start-up is an issue with the way our hard drives are formatted. Poppycock!
The creation of a boot CD is no longer rocket science. There are many, many folks out there doing it well and I am totally tired of being told I need to run a DOS routine, stand on one leg, and hit three keys while holding down the "shift" key, but only on the third Monday of the month to get something I paid for (and upgraded, and upgraded, and upgraded, at an additional cost each time) to work. I'm DONE! Not another penny. I have Active@DiskImage installed, a boot CD that works every time, and a vendor that supports it's products.
Redundant.
I also bought in to the 2010 upgrade, but got a refund a week after using it and reverted to 2009. To those who can't tolerate 2010, why not fall back on 2009, which for most has been quite stable and works great on win7 64bit (contrary to what Acronis will say...). I now have 4 copies of 2009, 3 of which were bought off ebay for $12 U.S.. You won't be able to get an upgrade for the ebay copies, but at that price, who cares? You're really not losing any money.
Let's hope that time tells a different story with 2011.