Customer Experience: Words cannot express how much my confidence in ATI has dropped

Here is a list of my experiences with ATI 2011 over the last 12 months. They illustrate the multiple levels of failure in this company and the many many hours of my wasted time.

Issue1) Backups that fail because of disks that are reported to be full when they are not. Not the hugest of issues but annoying and confidence reducing. Many posts about this. Fiddled and wasted my time and this eventually went away.

Issue 2) Having ATI 2011 installed on both my home computer cause issues with USB flash drives causing 1-2 minute delays after insertion before they are visible on the system. Fixed for 2012 by a patch but not worthy of a fix for 2011. Since I insert my USB key at work 20x a day the wait became not worth the trouble and ATI was gone from my laptop. Extremely poor business ethics not to fix ATI2011.

3) Consolidation takes so long that I have never been able to wait long enough to see if it actually works. Avoid

These issues are annoying but nothing compared to issue 4....

Issue 4)
I have been happily backing us my extremely stable system with an 80 GB Intel SSD with ATI 2011 for the last 6 months. Backups went perfectly and there wasn't even the slightest indication of any problem with the backups.

I am playing around trying to get some software to work, and end up damaging my Windows 7 install enough that it isn't worth trying to figure out ..... but that is what ATI2011 is for, just do a quick restore and all should be well.

Within Windows 7 I do a restore of my active Win7 partition. ATI asks for a reboot and when the ATI Boot loader come on it hangs. The restore isn't done and no error message or any other indication of why it failed is evident. (FAILURE 1)

OK so I stick in my ATI 2011 boot disk and try again. After waiting forever for it to start, and some fiddling I try to start the restore. It then tells me that "There may not be enough space on the target drive to restore". I hit OK thinking that I can try anyway but ATI just aborts the restore. (FAILURE 2). I am now worried. There is no indication of what I should do now form the program. I wipe my active partition to make space for the restore ( a mistake) and try again. Of course it doesn't work because there is no way it can work. ATI2011 needs 5% (or 6%) free space to do a restore and I don't have that on the drive. The SSD drive has 74GB of space and my image takes ~70GB. The program has this serious limitation is FAILURE 3 and that I wasn't warned doing the backup is FAILURE 4 for Acronis.

Then I search the ATI website on my cell as my computer is now inoperable and find out about the 5% space rule and what to do about it. The next day I go to a friends house and try to install ATI 2011 so I can reduce the size of the image. It takes forever to install and and after the reboot causes the system to hang on boot (FAILURE5). After a few install reinstall cycles I know it isn't going to work. Then I remember why ..... ATI won't install on a system with Simply Accounting on it (Failure 6) and this issue was never fixed from versions back to ATI2009 (Failure 7)

By now I have been 2 days without a computers and have wasted 6 hours.

I am now at a loss. I have 4 independent backups for my active partition and none of them can be used to restore by Win7 install to my 80GB hard drive. I could wipe one of my platter drives and restore to that to get my system running again, but unless I reduce the size of my image I will never get it back onto my SSD. Since my SSD only has programs I will have to do time consuming detective work to see what can be temporarily stripped out.

ATI 2011 is worse than useless for a system with a 80GB or less SSD with WIN7

I could reinstall but all the updates and program installs takes forever.

My experiences identified 7 + 2 serious failures in your company. That is one customer in 1 year. Some have bee outstanding issues since 2009.