Acronis Alternative
It is obvious from the reviews on Amazon, the Acronis forum,
and my own experience that Acronis Home Image 2011 is defective.
I need to find a reliable alternative.
From a standalone disk, I need the following features:
Systems: Windows XP Pro 32bit, Windows 7 64bit
1) Backup partitions
2) Recover partitions without damaging existing partitions
3) Clone partitions without damaging existing partitions
I appreciate your recommendations for a reliable alternative product.
I cannot afford to have my backups and recoveries not work.
I am a long time Acronis user and very disappointed their products
are no longer trustworthy.
John and Greg,
You will find several alternatives in the marketplace, at various price points. Make sure you test the software and recovery medium for your specific backup needs (types of backup and destination).
Greg,
Were you using a non-stop backup? It is rare to see a backup stop. When you delete a backup task, it deletes all the associated archive files. If you want to remove a task and create a new one, you can either use the remove function, or you can first move the TIB files you want to keep to another directory, and then delete the task.
No I never used non-stop backup. The last job I was referring to was a disk backup that was scheduled to run daily with version chaining scheme. And it ran fine for about 5 days then decided to delete all my backup files. That was just the latest (and last) problem that I'm going to put up with.
Over the last year the biggest problems were:
1) The scheduler is complete crap, it would some times run the jobs and sometimes not.
2) The scheduler would get into a loop were it would start a job then terminate it 20 seconds later then start it again over and over until you killed the scheduler process
3) The backup jobs were incapable of handling out-of-space issues on the backup drive, I tried every setting I could find for limiting the number of copies and deleting old backups and combining and compressing old backups. No setting ever was able to manage the backup space. When the backup disk was full the backups would stop without any notification. I would have to go and manually remove old tib files to recover space.
4) The restore option in the UI could never find the backup files. I would have to go and find the tib file on disk and open it from explorer.
I'm trying DT Utilities PC Backup Pro, I downloaded it last night and kicked off a full backup of C: . It was easy enough to setup and start using but I'm concerned with it's speed. It took almost 12 hours to do a full backup (270gb) to an external eSata drive.