Request to extend ATIH 2012 support to 30 days after the first update

Well stated!

I completely second the motion – identical situation here.

That would certainly seem like an appropriate and reasonable request. In fact, it might even turn out to be less than adequate given Acronis' own claims in response to direct inquiries about not yet understanding themselves at least some of those listed problems.

With regard to your item #7 and issue #4, for example, they have recently (see http://forum.acronis.com/forum/25514 ) replied to me that "we are still unaware that (sic) why and how the logs are created." That's not very reassuring given their earlier statement that the issue involves activities that are "very interactive ... with the internet." Familiarity with their own built-in "stealth while idling" factors or whatever the hell is actually going on hardly seems like an unreasonable expectation from this user's perspective.

The “unaware” issue is concerning… What’s more concerning are the reports that last week’s Update 1 Beta was less than successful [read as disaster].

Been using ATIH for a couple of years and not seen anything like this… Some releases have been buggy, but this one is just terrible. I have had to revert back to 2011 just to get a stable backup.

The communication on my own list of issues (now up to 9) has been less than encouraging. My list could not be submitted to the ticket system because my ppi expired… I am not willing to pay to submit bug reports… I sent them to Customer Service as a complaint.

Not sure of the Acronis support model, but the little communication that I have had to date is not encouraging – I was never asked to provide other than cursory log information – no follow-up, no nothing…

I certainly hope Product Management has clear visibility into what is going on with 2012 – this cannot be their finest hour. Word of mouth is a powerful force in the consumer software market – all it takes is one negative review… I don’t see to many recommendations coming from 2012.

Whilst it isn't ideal, it should be noted that Acronis offer unrestricted support for recovery purposes and if the problem is a bug they then do not charge.

It would seem a good idea though to allow a period for registered users when updates appear (perhaps 5 days or so), though Microsoft et al don't offer such things when their updates break systems unless you have a support contract.

First, thanks to hhanahrd and Richard for their responses.

To Colin B,

Thank you for replying.

The issue is not about recovering files but whether you can make a reliable backup in the first place.

If you buy a Microsoft product, you are asked, after the product is installed to register the product. If you say no, some of the features of the product after a few days are degraded. If you buy the product and don’t install it for a month, there is no loss of support.

If I purchase any boxed software and put the package on the shelf for weeks or months, support starts AFTER the product successfully installs.

Acronis and some other companies are now registering the product the instant that the credit card sale is authorized, NOT when the software is first installed and AFTER a successful install.

I purchased ATIH 2012 on Tuesday September 13 at 2:47 AM.

My next look at ATIH 2012 was Monday September 19. At this point I’ve already lost 6 days of support. On the 19th I went through the forum and decided that to replace my ATIH 2011 installation was risky and chose not to install ATIH 2012.

This brings us to today. I have not installed or even tried to install ATIH 2012 because I cannot afford to break a working install of ATIH 2011 and will likely NOT try to install ATIH 2012 until Acronis begins to address some of the most common complaints by issuing the first update.

At this point I have lost 20 days of support because I purchased the product online.

NOT VERY FAIR!

I was asking for support to be extended and expire 30 days after the first update is released. This would apply only to ATIH 2012.

The reason is simply that the risks associated with installing ATIH 2012 are too great especially if ATIH 2011 is working.

The handle issue may not impact customers that turn their computer off when not in use. My computer is never off and is rebooted only if an update requires a reboot. Leaky handles likely mean leaky objects. If a handle is open, what ever it is pointing to is also open. While most computers here have 4GB of memory, one computer has 1GB and any loss of memory due to leaks cannot be tolerated. While “sync” would be great, saving sync information, in my case, to Acronis is not going to happen.

While Microsoft offers limited support for released products when purchased after they have been installed, Microsoft offers UNLIMITED support for high priority updates and service packs.

Some of us posting here believe Acronis released this software prematutely and without adequate testing and needs to do more for its customers such as support extensions and for first time Acronis customers a free version of ATIH 2011 to keep them going until ATIH 2012 is fixed.

@ rickstep:

You are talking out of my soul.
I fully can support all of your statements. Especially when you are talking about “Quality Control – Quality Assurance” of the latest Acronis products.
I was using TI for the last 10 or 12 years and came along good and safe up to version I think it was TI 9 or 10. Then the quality of the product degraded version by version down to a level where other companies would not release the software from alpha to beta status.
Version ATIH 2011 made ne think it could not get worse than this.

Wrong,...........here is ATIH 2012!

I just tried to install it for about 5 times - no way.
I opened a support case - 10 days no answer.
I asked for a refund and the seller said "don't bother, you are not the first one" and gave me money back! Thanks.

I can only say: where are you going, Acronis?

Hi Rick,

Thank you for reaching out. I was not able to find any cases associated with your email address. Could you let me know which specific issues you encountered and we will be happy to have a Support Professional assist.

Alain Gentilhomme, our Head of Development wanted to respond separately and will do so.

We do understandably receive feedback about the 30 day support policy. We had unbounded support years ago. Unfortunately, it was subject to abuse as we became essentially a general HelpDesk for some Customers as well as a substitute for the User Guide. At the price point we sell our consumer products, it became untenable, not because of technical issues but general inquiries related and unrelated to the product. At that time, we also did a competitive analysis of support offerings and derived an offering that reflected the normal range for the industry. We actually are conducting the same exercise again currently.

As Colin mentioned, we do offer perpetual recovery support. That’s our business and we would never turn our back on Customers. Additionally, if you have an issue that is a confirmed bug, we will refund the Pay Per Incident (PPI) fee. To be completely transparent, the PPI we charge is actually less half than our cost to handle a case. We are not trying to make money on Support. Our goal is simply to prevent misuse and to ensure a clear runway for Customers with pressing issues. We have had Customers with up to 50 cases, with none of them being in any way a severe technical issue. (e.g. didn’t like GUI or how something worked) We also found that most issues (>85%) Customers encountered issues were within the first 30 days of purchase with the vast majority being “how to” questions. Unfortunately, we also discovered that the need for support beyond that was largely driven by additional installations of the same license on additional machines.

With activation, this becomes much less of an issue and may allow us to adapt our current policies.

As a percentage of licenses in production and relative to the industry average, the number of issues is rather small; however, we understand that is of little solace to those who do have issues. In a forum, you definitely see the issues in a concentrated form and it is not the best representation of the product. That said, we know we can do better and we will.

Thank you for your feedback.

Ed

Excellent reply, Ed. Don't necessarily agree with all of it personally, but very well stated. I look forward to Alain Gentilhomme's comments as well. Should be very interesting.

Ed Benack wrote:

In a forum, you definitely see the issues in a concentrated form and it is not the best representation of the product.

Heh heh. That's for sure. And Acronis certainly is to be commended for tolerating such open discussion in its own forums.

That said, we know we can do better and we will.

Apart from anything else, I would strongly suggest that your own developers and beta testers be given more weight (and the "marketeers" somewhat less) in deciding when new releases are "ready for prime time." I think you'll find that the long-term core stability benefits are much more critical to success (including economic success) than any alleged short-term promotional advantages to be gained from the premature release of add-on gimmicks. Once confidence has been lost for a backup and recovery utility, no amount of after-the-fact support and corrective actions would be adequate to recapture it IMO.

==> I would strongly suggest that your own developers and beta testers be given more weight (and the "marketeers" somewhat less) in deciding when new releases are "ready for prime time." I think you'll find that the long-term core stability benefits are much more critical to success (including economic success) than any alleged short-term promotional advantages to be gained from the premature release of add-on gimmicks. Once confidence has been lost for a backup and recovery utility, no amount of after-the-fact support and corrective actions would be adequate to recapture it IMO.

This is absolutely true for a backup/recovery utility. The folks market purchasing this type of software wants reliability above else. The Keep It Simple Stupid audience. Bells-and-whistles are nice, but only after the core basics operate flawlessly. For me, this was the most disappointing aspect of 2012 --- if the fluffy stuff had the issues, I would not care "as much". My vitriolic response to this release is that I am risking system integrity because a product was rushed-to-market. I really doubt that Acronis will ever receive an unqualified recommendation from me in the future. Like the shortened baseball season, there will always be a (but) in any recommendation given.

I totally concur with your comments. I was encouraged to purchase my first version of Acronis years ago by a person who now doesn't use it himself and won't recommend it to others. I certainly have recommended and continue to recommend that people stay away from ATIH2011 and ATIH2012. If I could find another product that was reliable and flexible, I would no longer be an Acronis customer either, and I am not sure how much long I will continue to tolerate, and pay for, buggy software, and the ridiculous 30-day support and then you are on your own unless you want to pay for technical support. Most of the other apps that I use have unlimited technical support at no charge.

Regards,
-Phil

I don't begrudge pay-for-support. In a previous life, I founded and operated a commercial software entity. The phase RTFM was a permanent reminder of how much support can drain valuable resources. But, and this is a BIG but, known or strongly suspected flaws in the software were triaged-out and support provided. At no time did we ever think of having folks pay to report / support bugs -- that is just pushing the limit too far. We also published known bugs so folks would not strangle themselves. Acronis does neither. Their support of recovery is great and a strong positive. But imagine what would happen if a crash occurs and the backup never occurs properly because of the NAS issues -- can you imagine that conversation.

Philip Campbell wrote:

If I could find another product that was reliable and flexible, I would no longer be an Acronis customer either, ...

I could be wrong, but I have a strong suspicion that at least some Acronis' developers -- expecially those who've been around since the introduction of what was originally a very straightforward and quite reliable backup utility -- are probably getting just about as PO'd as we end users in seeing their hard work gimmicked to death. Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll get angry enough to break away and start over with their own new product.

The ongoing fiasco is enough to make one seriously consider Mickeysoft's own Windows backup and recovery as a possible alternative.

I've been using Acronis for years without a problem so this was my first real attempt to contact their customer support. And when I tried, i found that the support period is 30 days after that they direct you to customer forums and KBs. (Of course, I had already looked for my solution there without success.) Seriously, 30 days??? Are they joking? I tell a lot of friends/family/customers to use Acronis. But if they won't support their own software, should i be looking elsewhere.

My problem is i get an error about unsupported hard disk drive trying to boot the CD and restore an image to a new SSD (a kingston SNV425-S2/128GB). First, it is obviously a error with the software and they won't even take my e-mail so i can report the issue to them. Second, as a minimum my kid gets 90 day support on a $1 game for his ipod; I can't even get e-mail support to recover an image onto a new hard drive from Acronis. Really, is Acronis looking for some new senior management -- I know I can do a better job than the hack who decided 30 day support was a good idea.

Sorry for the rant, but does anybody know how I can let Acronis know that their product isn't supporting a pretty standard SSD so they can make their product better?

David.

Hi Ed,

I'm writing this as I've been very furstrated for many years about the direction of the product specifically in the Quality Control and Defect area. I've finally made the choice of moving on to another product once updates for this major version are terminated. I'm looking forward to seeing some major product defect corrections before the next major release to change my mind and the recommendations I give. Correcting the defects should be an easy task, however, the past few years track record would indicate a very remote outcome for the clients. I've provided my perspective below:

Ed Benack wrote:

We do understandably receive feedback about the 30 day support policy. We had unbounded support years ago. Unfortunately, it was subject to abuse as we became essentially a general HelpDesk for some Customers as well as a substitute for the User Guide. At the price point we sell our consumer products, it became untenable, not because of technical issues but general inquiries related and unrelated to the product. At that time, we also did a competitive analysis of support offerings and derived an offering that reflected the normal range for the industry. We actually are conducting the same exercise again currently.

Yes, you have an excellent point, the "Help Desk" is costly when answers are (well) documented in the User Guide. It's amazing how much of my valuable time was wasted using a feature of this software to later discover through technical support "it" (the feature) should not be used. It is unfortunate the User Guide is underrepresented when it comes to providing "full" coverage of the product. Hence, a 'technical support' question was resolved after research was required of the support team since there was no documentation on the feature in the User Guide (the process still has minimal documentation and still exists, go figure).

Ed Benack wrote:

At the price point we sell our consumer products, it became untenable, not because of technical issues but general inquiries related and unrelated to the product.

I'm sure this was a true event (untenable support). However, based on my experience with the product and seeing the change in 'vision' and 'quality' makes me a bit dubious of the analysis for the root cause. I think there was an over focus on the entry level consumer with the extreme interface mods and resulting support issues increased from the 'I can't figure out how to program my VCR' community. A byproduct was a significant increase in defects that otherwise would have been caught. I have an answer for you below on your solution going forward, it's easy, and normally, I'd charge $50,000 for it, but I'll give it free as I'd like to see it implemented and have my backup software working without me going crazy.

Ed Benack wrote:

At that time, we also did a competitive analysis of support offerings and derived an offering that reflected the normal range for the industry. We actually are conducting the same exercise again currently.

I'm confused. I've been in the "industry" for 30 years. The specific product in this discussion (prior naming variants too) has been plagued with abnormally high product defects for many years now. I have to ask the rhetorical question: Is anyone there actually using this product at the shop? If I spend 15 minutes on a production product and find half a dozen defects (of any type) without any effort, there is a serious management oversight problem. I'm glad to hear there is a ongoing concern at Acronis.

Ed Benack wrote:

As Colin mentioned, we do offer perpetual recovery support. That’s our business and we would never turn our back on Customers.

I'm glad to hear such a strong conviction. I'd love to read this assertion in bold at the opening of the User Guide, it's good stuff. However, since I get charged for the product "it is your business" and further what makes this untrue is the extensive efforts made in reinventing the product GUI. Just make what exists work, which is worth the price of the upgrade alone. Each upgrade has been having significant interface changes that by definition typically don't 'add' value to achieving the backup and management of the archive data. I'm all for changes, provided they are enhancements and not eye candy focused. Acronis earns a 10 out of 10 for the beautiful graphics. However, this isn't why I'm purchasing the product, I'd buy it and recommend it hands down if it was rock solid and had zero graphics. Functionality is everything, when you have that adding graphics is easy. Changes need to be extensively tested and verified as working correctly; contrary to popular belief this is actually not as challenging as is perceived, but few developers know how and management often is the cause. Example: the "Sort by" on the "Backup and recovery" tab doesn't work (v2012, Build 5545). Turnaround time to provide updates is way too infrequent. Using Microsoft as a benchmark isn't in the best interest of your clients and indirectly the future of the product.

Ed Benack wrote:

Additionally, if you have an issue that is a confirmed bug, we will refund the Pay Per Incident (PPI) fee. To be completely transparent, the PPI we charge is actually less half than our cost to handle a case. We are not trying to make money on Support. Our goal is simply to prevent misuse and to ensure a clear runway for Customers with pressing issues. We have had Customers with up to 50 cases, with none of them being in any way a severe technical issue. (e.g. didn’t like GUI or how something worked) We also found that most issues (>85%) Customers encountered issues were within the first 30 days of purchase with the vast majority being “how to” questions. Unfortunately, we also discovered that the need for support beyond that was largely driven by additional installations of the same license on additional machines.

I'm concerned about the PPI fee from the perspective of Acronis being "honest" about the technical support concern classification. Hypothetical Example: I cannot edit a backup profile to use different schedule criteria. The User Guide doesn't say anything about having to execute the application as "Run As Administrator" when making an edit. The software has a design defect which doesn't escalate the security privileges per Windows 7 specifications, but tech support says that doing so will 'resolve' my problem. Is this a PPI fee refund? In my opinion absolutely yes, and the User Guide and defect tracking (viewable description and status by end-users) needs to be immediately updated. If this scenario had the design flaw effectively documented in the User Guide (or defect tracking) and I failed to read it, then yes, the PPI fee would be appropriate. The client is the one who pays the bills and is better protected and is encourage to be active by reporting product defects. In my proposal below and the $50,000 answer (to achieve the objective, increase profitability, and have very happy life-long clients):

1. Management policy on zero defects must be supported, if necessary, by reducing number of next product features.
2. Replace anyone in the loop who doesn't completely support the zero effect policy (those into propaganda will kill your efforts).
3. Document every feature in the product in the User Guide, everything, means everything. Where an more powerful flavor of the product provides enhanced capability be sure to indicate this clearly. Upselling doesn't hurt.
4. Provide a short description list of defect / enhancements with the associated tracking number. Known defects would remain in all future minor and major revisions defect lists until resolved (corrected or eliminated feature that thereby removes the defect).
5. Require as the end-user reports their defect they acknowledge the technical support resolution policy, which requires having read the current edition of User Guide and the current known defect list.
6. Provide support for that major version until the next major version is released. The support is usable for defects, including those non-defects that can be found in the User Guide by reading it. Technical support reviews the concern if it isn't identified as a defect the account is marked as freebee given for this major version. Technical support can be continued to be used until a non-defect request is made at which time the account is on hold and PPI can address this and all other support requests until the next major version is purchased. This controls the non-defect requests to an absolute minimum while being able to focus resources on the defects. Unlimited support concerns can be addressed by one client license who is responsible and diligent. The focus is for Acronis to resolve and get an update out as quickly as possible. A defect would be as simple as having a typo in the User Guide. It could even be a poorly documented feature that needs to be enhanced from exchange with the client. PPI refund events would still apply for those who have travelled down this path when their reported concern was a defect and they already had their freebee. Based on the stated statistics this method would actually significantly reduce the "how to" overhead, especially at the initial new major product version release. The above can be augmented by adding the current 30 day 'unlimited' anything support, so you get past the 30-day money back policy with educated "how to" need users.
7. Implement better method for enhancement requests.
8. In the end it is all about the end-user experience and having the product perform exactly as the end-user expects the product to perform (per the specifications: User Guide and what exists in the software itself).

Ed Benack wrote:

With activation, this becomes much less of an issue and may allow us to adapt our current policies.

Exactly how does "activation" have any effect on end-users consuming valuable and limited technical support resources? Does activation now perform some quality control functionality? The whole 30-days support is a piracy concern?

Ed Benack wrote:

As a percentage of licenses in production and relative to the industry average, the number of issues is rather small; however, we understand that is of little solace to those who do have issues. In a forum, you definitely see the issues in a concentrated form and it is not the best representation of the product. That said, we know we can do better and we will.

I didn't join the "beta" evaluation group as I have grown to feel my suggestions, concerns and other desired product enhancements are a waste of my time. I haven't seen anything implemented since version 8 of the product, just before the radical and almost continuous GUI paradigm shift occurred. If the above statement is true then a superior plan is needed for reporting and resolving product defects. I'm not sure where you are getting your statistics for the defects in the product, but I can say definitely this product is above the average in defects and responsiveness for updates is slow. I'm using the approximately 500 products I use as a benchmark and Acronis is in the top 5 for habitually being on my bitch list, when it should be on the top 5 grand slam list as it was in the early days.

~Zardoz2293

Zardoz2293 wrote:

Just make what exists work, which is worth the price of the upgrade alone.

Hear, hear! From my perspective, that pretty much says it all. I'd even be willing to add a tip if they actually did that. Alternatively, if they find that impossible, they could at least improve the product's installer/uninstaller so that we users could exclude the gimmicks that remain defective and that are mostly useless anyhow. It might not solve their support cost issues completely, but it sure couldn't hurt.

Incidentally, what has happened to the promised response from the Head of Development, Alain Gentilhomme? I doubt that I'm alone in being highly interested in what he might have to say.

Zardoz2293 wrote:

Great post. Thank you!

Sorry for the delayed response, however, the delay now moves this post back to the top of the list.

Rick

All - thanks for the detailed feedback. Let me give you some of my perspectives:

First of all - I understand some of the frustration regarding the bugs & quality. I really do. You may wonder what we are doing about it. We recently took a series of measures to address some of the concerns mentioned above. Without going into the details of how we do development and QA, there are now a set of well-defined steps we are going through before releasing. We had some of these steps before (an exit criteria with metrics) but they were not as enforced as they are today.
We just released an update of ATI Home 2012. We tried very hard in that release to fix pretty much all the bugs reported to us so far. Some of them did not make it since they were reported after the cut-off date but this is a small number. This doesn't mean that your specific bug is fixed for sure (for instance if it was never reported to support of we didn't discover it ourselves) but still we tried hard. I do hope you will see an improvement and if not, let me know.

Obviously after reading the previous paragraph, you will think “good they are fixing bugs but these bugs should have never been there when they shipped the product the first time. That's their job to find them and fix them”. This is true. The hard part thought is finding them and here some of the reason why:

I see some comments that our software is beta version, not tested, etc… Well, we had a beta and it lasted ~8 weeks. You may not believe me but most if not all the problems we (and you) have seen on installation and upgrade for instance were not reported during the beta. We probably also missed some specific tests during our own testing but regardless these issues went mostly undetected during the beta. That also means that we have an issue with the number and quality of the beta testing and we are addressing this as well.
Correct installation and upgrade is key feature that should work 100% (100% is likely not achievable but this is the goal). It is critical for our Customers (you) but it is also critical for us. If Customers cannot install when they are testing the product in trial then for sure they will not buy the software. If we had known the installation issues back in august we would not have shipped the product back then. We would have delayed the release to fix them.

It was mentioned in an earlier post that we should not deal with upgrade but rather (like some other software companies are doing) save the preferences and then uninstall/reinstall. Till this release we had a requirement to reboot the machine after installation because we install drivers. This means that the uninstall/reinstall would have created potentially 2 reboots and this was not acceptable. Now that we removed the reboot requirement in most cases (nobody likes reboot so we wanted to get rid of this drawback) we will revisit our installation process and look at ways to improve it. We could not get it done entirely for this release

I also see a number of complains that some specific hardware is not supported. Unfortunately, we are hardware dependent. I wish our software would just work on top of Windows and we could rely on the operating system to completely abstract the hardware for us but this is not the case. There are specific hardware dependencies. We try internally to test on as much hardware as possible but we cannot cover all the market. There are just too many different hard drives, NAS, network cards, USB drives, configurations out there. For instance, it is known that we had some NAS issue in this release where the user could not backup to the NAS in some cases or the NAS was not detected. We tested the software before releasing on several NASes and it worked fine. But then it didn’t work on some others NASes unfortunately.
Another example would be the support of some USB drives. We work fine with most of them but there are some brand/model where we discover some issues. I know and I’ve seen in the forums Customers complaining about it. We found the issue and we fixed it but unfortunately we could not include that fix in this update. We will look at ways to deliver it through a hotfix.

But overall, here is again a reason why good beta testing program would help. We are not Microsoft and we will never have the hardware lab they have even if our own hardware lab is growing every year. This also means that we need YOUR help to help us find these issues while we are in beta.

I read concerns about the UI and the changes we made over the years. There are certainly valid concerns that we made too many changes. But we did these changes because we wanted to make sure that potential users, not so familiar with backup, could start using the product easily. Clearly we had some hits and misses here and we should have done better job controlling the UI changes over the years. I do feel personally that the UI in 2012 is very usable and we do not intent to change it anymore for the coming years besides tweaks here and there. I looked at the feedback from users from various places (forums, customer survey, support, press) and the comments, in general, on the 2012 UI have been quite positive. I understand that some of you will disagree that this UI is better or more usable than the one we had in but we have to look at satisfying the majority of our users. There were UI complains on ATIH 2011 and I believe we addressed them.

Rick made the comment at the beginning of this thread that maybe ATIH 2011 should have been the last version supporting XP. This is a good point and something we thought long and hard about. Unfortunately when we reviewed our installed base and the OS our Customers use, there was still, at the time we made the decision (and even somewhat today), too many users on XP. Probably the next release will not support XP but again we will review our install base and make the decision later on this year. Believe me, not having to support XP anymore would make our life much easier.

Another comment from Rick was about logging. We understand the resource constraints linked to excessive logging. Inaccurate or not enough detailed logging was an issue in Acronis True Image 2011 which prevented us to really understand customer issues and address them effectively. In addition, we got very clear feedback during the beta that users wanted to get very detailed logging, esp for the synchronization feature. We may have gone overboard ATIH 2012 release and this is something we reviewed in the recently released update and that we will continue to address.

Last but not least, regarding the sync, I want to clarify a couple of things. We do offer 3 ways to do synchronization: a) Synchronization between a computer and a locally attached device, b) synchronization between 2 or more computers c) synchronization between 2 or more computers and storage of the data (with versioning) in Acronis Online storage. We do require internet logging for all 3. It is definitely arguable that this is not needed for the first one and we did it mostly because this would keep the UI simple. This is something we will likely revisit.
For the 2 others, internet logging is needed. For the 3rd sync option, the reason is obvious. Even for the 2nd option, we need it because we do not know where the computers are. They could be on the same network or not. If they are not on the same network we need to “relay” the information from one place to the other and without knowing their location, that “relay” is the internet. In addition, there was the need to have a central place where users can define their syncs or subscribe to them and that place was again the internet.
But in the sync option #1 and #2, we never store data anywhere. Actually in option #1 the data will stay local on the computer or the attached device. In option #2, we try as much as possible to establish a direct connection between the computers without going through the internet if possible. Connections are also always encrypted

Sorry for the long post. I wanted to reply earlier but I wanted to get that update out first. I hope it will resolve some of the concerns you had.
Please do not read this reply as a bunch of excuses. That was not my intention. I wanted to provide you some facts and what we will do to address most of the concerns being raised. I really believe that with the new processes in place, things will get better. And if you feel they don’t, then let me know through the forum or PM me.

Thanks
A.

Alain, thank you very much for your reply.

Can I please ask you that you at least provide a bug-report email address or something? My ATI is set to keep backups below 1TB, but whenever the backup get's over 1TB I get an error that says "User has cancelled the backup"

I most definitely did not cancelled my backup, and I am most definitely not in the mood to pay per incident fee to report this bug/feature. There has to be _some_ way of getting in contact with the devs.

The forums don't cut it, since there is never any follow-up.

Hi Alain.

Let me say first that build 6131 is a definite improvement. I've re-installed (clean) under three OSes (WinXP, Vista snd Win7x64) on the same physical machine and have noticed no re-activation problems or other significant issues on my platform. The TIH logs still show "No Windows Libraries" warnings under both XP and Vista, but without any actual operational consequences that I've noticed. And previous idle time open file handles and logging issues now seem to have been reduced to a tolerable level -- even with all auto-start services active! Thanks very much for that at least.

I do understand your wanting to wait until the update build was available before commenting, but an earlier word or two would have been appropriate, I think. The frustration levels produced by the initial TIH 2012 release were unprecedented in my own experience and deserved fuller and more immediate "official" acknowledgement at the senior management level IMO. This was no "tempest in a teapot" situation and has caused significant loss of trust, if only because of the very high expectations for a "rescue" product of this type.

I believe you have hit at least one nail squarely on the head in saying that "[c]orrect installation and upgrade is key feature that should work 100%." I appreciate that the filter-driver handling issues involved, even with Acronis' own multi-product line, let alone other possible complications, are not simple. Nevertheless, the disaster potential ("blue screen" lockups, etc.) involved with the status quo is entirely unacceptable and some better answer than supplementary version-specific cleanup tools muct be a very high priority. I, for one, wouldn't even think of attempting anything but a totally clean installation of any Acronis product in the current circumstances. Too risky.

So thank you for the fixes so far, but please don't loosen the reins too much just yet. You still have a way to go before this user's trust is completely restored.

Best regards,
RV

P.S.: I still say the installer should be redesigned to allow the end user to deselect some of the less-used "features" as options only. At the very least, their services should be capable of being disabled directly within the main application's config interface.

I totally agee with the ps, its mad to have masses of "extras " over and above a imiging program that we are foced to install and put up with them causing problems for many.

==> next release will not support XP but again we will review our install base and make the decision later on this year
If you have lot's of users still on XP, then you need some new customers... These are not the folks who will keep upgrading for all the 'new and improved' features that you are offering. No serious software house is supporting XP at this point -- except some gaming shops.

Think it's safe to say that Acronis took a serious hit with existing and potential customers with 2012. While your post is long on 'we will do better', it completely sidesteps the OP.

Strengthening QA and adding some HW in your lab will not fix what is broken. While some of the NAS issues would have been caught -- take a full look at the issue list. Some of the bugs are so obvious, glaring and HW independent that they either: 1) must have been seen and ignored or 2) QA is completely broken. For example: 1) incorrect date on backups, 2) Backup chain deletion blows away the wrong chain, 3) file backups on entire volumes creates duplicates, ... the list goes on and on. How could these have not been noticed internally?

Let's face it, you guys screwed up. It's obvious what happened -- Acronis needed the upgrade revenue on a particular timeline -- the release was pushed through QA -- and the customer feels the heat [for now]. Wait to 2013 release, I bet Acronis will feel the heat then. If you want to start a forum poll, I bet none of us will upgrade until U1 of that release, if ever.

There should be some attempt to make amends other than 'we promise to do better' and 'let us know if we don't'. Extending the 30 days as the OP requests would be a start.

As I have found the un-integrating with windows is bust again. It’s not just old bugs remaining its new ones bring added or returning that shows how appalling the testing was for both the original 2012 and the update. I had issues with USB detection, with the patch that was then OK. The update hasn’t totally broken that but at least one USB memory stick, a HP one, worked OK now takes ages for it to be recognised.
As said promises mean nothing they have been made endlessly over the years and the product has in the main got worse. Symantec had years of growing blot and terrible security updates. Somehow something got through to them and with there internet security products they did a total restart. Many of us who stopped using there Norton products many years ago have moved back, the products have issues but nothing like ATIH, support tends to be much better and fixes get produced fairly rapidly.
I installed Genie Timeline on my wife’s PC. We had some issues, there support was replying within hours until the problem was fixed. Not promises of doing better or wait for next year’s version for the fix but getting it fixed NOW. The ATIH for me is so unreliable I use the boot media for everything and only install so as to be able to access image’s if need be to recover something. My ideal would be a viewer and boot media, even Acronis haven’t ever managed to mess that up so as stop it working for me.

Let’s just face it – Acronis is on borrowed time. Full stop.

The hardware guys (Seagate, et all) are bundling non-stop SW with their 1TB drives for under $200 and the SSD guys are bundling cloning/alignment tools.

If Acronis fixes its house, who knows? But they need to do something -- fast. I understand they are trying to expand customer base to compete with the HW-bundled packages… Seagate's bundled non-stop backup must be killing them.

The code base is no longer tight and coupled with a low fidelity development lifecycle dooms ATHI to end-of-life. Norton, et all managed to re-group, but Acronis doesn't seem to have the ware with all nor willpower to fix the structural issues that started a few years ago.

Acronis is chasing a market that has evolved along different lines and they don't have the resources, market presence nor skills to get ahead of the curve.

I suspect the end game is either m&a (if they have interesting IP) -- or commoditized out of existence within the next two years.

If Win8 deploys non-stop backup, cloud storage and cloning/recovery from boot media – it’s instant game over for THI. If Win8 server bundles something like CA backup for the SMB market, it's totally game over for the Acronis corportate entity.

hhansard wrote:

The code base is no longer tight and coupled with a low fidelity development lifecycle dooms ATHI to end-of-life. Norton, et all managed to re-group, but Acronis doesn't seem to have the ware with all nor willpower to fix the structural issues that started a few years ago.

Regretfully, I think I have to agree with much of that. Having read Alain's response several times now, it seems to me that he doesn't really "get it", especially not the aspects that many users (including this one) perceive as equivalent to a breach of trust for a product of this type. The primary motivator (at his level anyhow) appears to be "for dummies" considerations and cosmetics rather than stability and reliability in the core backup and recovery functions.

For that matter, I fail to see how his stated ease-of-use concerns will provide much benefit to anyone if those core functions cannot be installed/updated/uninstalled without risking total disaster and are less than totally reliable when they are. All things considered, I don't find Alain's defensive reactions to the many thoughtful user inputs here very encouraging.

==> Regretfully, I think I have to agree with much of that. Having read Alain's response several times now, it seems to me that he doesn't really "get it", especially not the aspects that many users (including this one) perceive as equivalent to a breach of trust for a product of this type. The primary motivator (at his level anyhow) appears to be "for dummies" considerations and cosmetics rather than stability and reliability in the core backup and recovery functions.

This is exactly why I wrote the post. They don't 'get it' and, more importantly, they may not have the inhouse resources to 'get it'...

In regards to John7 comment about integration, it appears that this is not widespread and can only be reproduced with difficulty (so you and I appear to be a rarity at this moment). There is I understand a KB article being written with a workaround until the cause can be found.

I suspect that the work around will be a registry file that will need to be merged into registry or manual editing.

FWIW, I can confirm that unchecking that integration option worked okay for me (reverted to Windows backup in Control Panel) under Win7x64. Maybe it's one of those "critical sequence" anomalies. I unchecked mine immediately after installing.

On the other hand, I had to fix it when I UNinstalled the previous build. And yes, it does require a registry (re)merge. It's not a big item and I could probably post a quickfix.reg file if it would help in the meantime.

Alain, first let me say thank you for your reply. Also thanks to ED for his reply on October 5.

This response was first written in Microsoft Word on October 6 as a response to Ed Benack’s post from the 5th. I write long posts offline to reduce my mistakes and I never posted the response at that time. The following is an updated version of my thoughts from 6 weeks ago with a few additions.

It's obvious that Acronis has rationalized the 30 day support policy and gross abuse by some distorts reality. That said, there can always be improvements and the intent of the original post was to start that process. I noticed that the when version 6131 was released version 5545 was removed. In previous years, older versions were available. I ask again to allow 30 day support from November 15 for version 6131 to anyone who purchased TIH 2012.

As the Director of Manufacturing / Manufacturing Manager of a Medical Electronics company and also of a company that manufactured credit & debit authorization terminals (now retired), I found that software and firmware were the most difficult to control.

Most problems that I encountered were traced back to undisciplined programmers. Because our code was modular, we were able to trace the code to the writer, but it still took excessive time, in some cases, to solve the issue.

Some thoughts going forward:

First, fix the issue that does not allow a customer to post a bug report regardless if is 29 days or 365 days. Some of the Acronis customers are extremely knowledgeable and are willing to help with issues without needing support. This can be done in days. Generate a form which will give you the problem, customer’s email address and the programmer (or other staff) can communicate directly. It should not be too difficult to determine quickly whether the person reporting the bug is being helpful or wasting valuable time.

Consider completely separate and stand alone software versions. A program can be perfect and fail do to an integrated installation routine. Combining a program for Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit is as silly as combing an installation program for Windows 7 and an Apple O/S. Vista and Windows 7 are related, 32-bit and 64 bit are not and XP doesn’t fit anywhere. XP could be dropped. Microsoft doesn’t support it any more. You would, however, need to distribute all O/S versions that you have agreed to support.

While writing software is never trivial, the changes from 2011 to 2012 should not have caused the type of problems that customers are complaining about. Companies that design hardware must always redesign from the beginning. Software from most companies is built on the code of the previous year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years and in many cases contains lines of code that are just waiting to fail because most companies test the additional new code and don’t bother to properly test the new code against the old code.

Windows XP, XP SP1, SP2, SP3 and Windows Vista, Vista SP1, Vista SP2 and Windows 7, 7 SP1 are all different operating systems. The 64 bit versions are different again. The media versions are different again. The Home and Home Premium versions are stripped down versions and are different again. This list totals about 30 variants. Which variant does Acronis support or not support.

How many years does your code represent and was all of the old code stripped out or merely commented out and a semi-colon (;) accidentally erased? Is your code properly reading the Microsoft O/S version information and properly setting the memory etc. While new operating systems allocate memory dynamically, Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 98SE used hardcode memory.

Is the Acronis code that good and that mature that Acronis software isn’t crashing because of Data Execution Protection? Data Execution Protection is turned on, on all my computers including Windows XP.

It used to be said that for every programming hour there needed to be 10 hours of testing. For completely new code, the new tools make programming easier and shorten test time.

To reuse old code, adapt old code to new uses, the problems grow exponentially because the younger programmers don’t understand the old code and old calls and may make a small change that can have disastrous effects.

Hardware:

Almost all hardware that is on the market has to be, constantly updated because the hardware (devices) will not be available in 18 months or in as little as 6. The loss of staff to newer, younger, smarter staff has a minimal impact, since a new product could be in the market place within 6 months if the company has a good/excellent historical reputation. Access to financial resources directly or via loans WILL keep the company afloat and may mask short term hiccups within a company.

Software:

Almost all software that is on the market has to be, constantly updated because software needs new features to attract new customers even if the new features make little sense, bloat the software and take a stable product from reliable (or close to reliable) to the point where long term customers and new customers begin to “BOLT” (leave quickly for another product) to somewhere else.

User interface:

My first experience with programming (at 46 years old) was when Visual Basic 1.0 came on the market 20 years ago. After some initial failures on my part, and upgrades to VB3.0 the code, which was for tracking employees, developing a database and producing Photo Identification badges was stable and I was able to develop several user interfaces, full versions, strip down versions or custom versions; all using the same code. The key was to keep track of all the links to menus and buttons. Changing a user interface does NOT change how the program functions unless a deliberate change is implemented.

Regardless of how Acronis wants to spin this, the code that Acronis uses has NOTHING to do with the user interface. If the code doesn’t work, the new, old, neat, stylish interface won’t fix it.

While the hardware designers can quickly recover from the losses of key staff because the chips (integrated circuits and processors constantly change) and are “wired” for discrete change, software designers MUST carry over existing features to future products. Changes to software tools constantly change, requiring software companies to learn new calls for new tools. While new hardware designs (new cpu’s) basically reset the design environment, software developers MUST carry old features to new hardware and new software tools. While the hardware group could replace all of their staff with recent University Graduates, the software company MUST keep enough competent staff, expert in the “OLD” calls, etcetera to bridge to the new staff and tools as working software is re-written today to perform a function from yesterday, or going as far back as 2001 when Windows XP was released.

My guess is that the experienced software individuals at Acronis were either recruited away, got pissed off with current management, were retired by the company or retired on their own and the result is that Acronis has lost valuable resources that they could not afford to lose and had no plan in place to correct the problem, by offering incentives, hiring equivalent resources from other companies or finding new graduates with expertise in “dying program resources”.

I do not expect Acronis to acknowledge, to agree or disagree with the above analysis.

Acronis has some issues that are well known industry issues and the facts are that these:

1. Acronis ATIH 2012 was released before the mantra “Acronis; reliable backup on any system at any time” was achieved. Acronis actually never achieved “reliable backup on any system at any time” even with ATIH 2011 before moving to ATIH 2012.
2. Senior management pushed for a release of ATIH 2012 close to 12 months after the ATIH 2011 release to keep momentum and a revenue stream without considering the consequences.

Acronis has about 9 months to sort out whether to continue on with the “every 12 months a new version” or not. As was pointed out earlier, most of us who posted here, will not buy in the future before update 1.

Many years ago I never upgraded to a new Microsoft O/S until after SP1. Acronis is now added to the list, and I will do the same with all other programs after this disastrous release. I buy software that I need and I expect it to ALWAYS work out of the box or immediately after download.

For many of us, software installation and use, HAS TO BE AS SIMPLE as a point and shoot camera. Unbox the camera, install the batteries, set the date & time, set the resolution and take the picture and know that the image has been saved.

My last point in the lengthy post is one that irks me the most.

A direct quote from Alian “We are not Microsoft and we will never have the hardware lab they have even if our own hardware lab is growing every year.”

If Wikipedia has its facts correct, at revenues of $170,000,000.00, the expenditure of $100,000.00 could buy a lot of hardware, and if your staff is any good at all, could probably get you motherboards etc. FREE, from many companies. Quote “This also means that we need YOUR help to help us find these issues while we are in beta”. As you may have learned, not all beta testers are reliable and are simply looking for a free product.

Acronis has several years of forum posts. Acronis has the email addresses of all of the posters. Pick those that you think can help. Send them an email asking if they would like to participate, and GIVE them a free copy for their assistance. For most of us, 2 or 3 hours of test time exceeds the value of the program and for Acronis, amounts to thousands of dollars in savings for staff that you don’t have and hardware that you don’t own.

Acronis TIH 2012 has several pieces. Make sure that piece A can run independantly from piece B. That doesn’t mean B can’t read from A, it means A & B have all the resources to run without the other present.

If I keep going I will be writing a book.

This post is not about trashing Acronis. This post is about getting through to Acronis that there are deficiencies in the way they develop software, and that 95% or more of the issues are known (and logged over the last 30 years) and that some at Acronis don’t seem to think that they are important.

Rick.

==> My last point in the lengthy post is one that irks me the most.
==> A direct quote from Alian “We are not Microsoft and we will never have the hardware lab they have even if our own hardware lab is ==> growing every year.”

That was the tipping point for me as well... There are numerous examples of small shops producing top-flight utilities and sub-systems. I remember calling IDM years ago with a product suggestion and getting, "He's not home from school yet"... and yes, it was High School. That may be an extreme example, but it is one that has always stuck with me over the years... You don't need to be large to do great work in the SW world. And you are spot on: up-front CAPX and $100K/year funds a decent test lab.

I don't disgree with the underlying principles as stated. In fairness, however, it must be admitted that the hardware issues involved for a product like TIH are just a bit more complex than those for a text editor like IDM UltraEdit. You're certainly right about the latter. It's a truly great product, and the support is incredibly responsive -- almost like "you want it, you got it!" I think he must be home from school most of the time now, but probably spends more time at the bank. ;~)

RickStep wrote:

My guess is that the experienced software individuals at Acronis were either recruited away, got pissed off with current management, were retired by the company or retired on their own and the result is that Acronis has lost valuable resources that they could not afford to lose and had no plan in place to correct the problem, by offering incentives, hiring equivalent resources from other companies or finding new graduates with expertise in “dying program resources”.

I think you nailed it, dead on.

Colin B wrote:

In regards to John7 comment about integration, it appears that this is not widespread and can only be reproduced with difficulty (so you and I appear to be a rarity at this moment). There is I understand a KB article being written with a workaround until the cause can be found.

I suspect that the work around will be a registry file that will need to be merged into registry or manual editing.

Colin
Sorry you too ended with the errer trying my isue out.

John

pro-logic wrote:

Can I please ask you that you at least provide a bug-report email address or something? My ATI is set to keep backups below 1TB, but whenever the backup get's over 1TB I get an error that says "User has cancelled the backup"

Pro-logic - we do read the forums and our support team does to. You issue has been recorded and we'll if we can repro and fix it. But I also recommend that you go through the support team if you really feel this is a bug as they can colloect information that will alow us to narrow down the problem. As Ed stated above, we do not charge fees for something that is a bug
Thanks

Richard Virtue wrote:

So thank you for the fixes so far, but please don't loosen the reins too much just yet. You still have a way to go before this user's trust is completely restored.

Best regards,
RV

P.S.: I still say the installer should be redesigned to allow the end user to deselect some of the less-used "features" as options only. At the very least, their services should be capable of being disabled directly within the main application's config interface.

Hi Richard - no I'm not loosening the reins yet. Regarding the installer that should be redesign, we will consider that for the next release. I can't say at this stage if this will make it or not. But what do you mean exactly by services ? if you do not use T&D for instance, then nothing is activated. The driver was installed but is not used

Thanks

Richard Virtue wrote:

Regretfully, I think I have to agree with much of that. Having read Alain's response several times now, it seems to me that he doesn't really "get it", especially not the aspects that many users (including this one) perceive as equivalent to a breach of trust for a product of this type. The primary motivator (at his level anyhow) appears to be "for dummies" considerations and cosmetics rather than stability and reliability in the core backup and recovery functions.

For that matter, I fail to see how his stated ease-of-use concerns will provide much benefit to anyone if those core functions cannot be installed/updated/uninstalled without risking total disaster and are less than totally reliable when they are. All things considered, I don't find Alain's defensive reactions to the many thoughtful user inputs here very encouraging.

Richard - I'm sorry you are taking this way. If you read actually again my post you will see that the UI consideration issues was only 1 paragraph out of many. My reply started by some statements about quality. I can undersand your frustration and that you do not want to believe. Are things perfect today ? no otherwise I would not take the time to post and reply. Now time will tell.

RickStep wrote:

While writing software is never trivial, the changes from 2011 to 2012 should not have caused the type of problems that customers are complaining about. Companies that design hardware must always redesign from the beginning. Software from most companies is built on the code of the previous year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years and in many cases contains lines of code that are just waiting to fail because most companies test the additional new code and don’t bother to properly test the new code against the old code

Yes you are correct but this was not the case with ATIH 2012. We had to do some very low changes in the code to support new features requested by Customers like UEFI machine and GPT drive. This support impacted a large part of ATIH low level code base. Now I know that some of you will say that these are just “excuses”. I understand it can be interpreted this way but this is what happened.

RickStep wrote:

Consider completely separate and stand alone software versions. A program can be perfect and fail do to an integrated installation routine. Combining a program for Windows XP 32-bit and Windows 7 64-bit is as silly as combing an installation program for Windows 7 and an Apple O/S. Vista and Windows 7 are related, 32-bit and 64 bit are not and XP doesn’t fit anywhere. XP could be dropped. Microsoft doesn’t support it any more. You would, however, need to distribute all O/S versions that you have agreed to support.

I explained previously why XP could not be dropped. You all are advanced users but this is not the case for all our Customers. And this is not because Microsoft doesn’t support it that people do not use it anymore.
We considered having 2 versions but then you have people picking the wrong version and complaining they cannot install. Or you merge everything into one single package and then it becomes very large for download. There was no perfect solution and we picked one that seemed the best at that time. Again this decision will be revisited for the next release

Hardware:

RickStep wrote:

Almost all hardware that is on the market has to be, constantly updated because the hardware (devices) will not be available in 18 months or in as little as 6. The loss of staff to newer, younger, smarter staff has a minimal impact, since a new product could be in the market place within 6 months if the company has a good/excellent historical reputation. Access to financial resources directly or via loans WILL keep the company afloat and may mask short term hiccups within a company.

A direct quote from Alian “We are not Microsoft and we will never have the hardware lab they have even if our own hardware lab is growing every year.”

If Wikipedia has its facts correct, at revenues of $170,000,000.00, the expenditure of $100,000.00 could buy a lot of hardware, and if your staff is any good at all, could probably get you motherboards etc. FREE, from many companies. Quote “This also means that we need YOUR help to help us find these issues while we are in beta”. As you may have learned, not all beta testers are reliable and are simply looking for a free product.

And we do all of this. We try to keep up with the new hardware (and this is for instance why we added UEFI/GPT support in the product in this release. My point was that the hardware set is very large. It is not as if we are not working with any of the new hardware. It is just that we do not have all the new hardware available. Nor can we do it with just loans. And what we invest in hardware is higher than some of the figures reported above.

RickStep wrote:

Regardless of how Acronis wants to spin this, the code that Acronis uses has NOTHING to do with the user interface. If the code doesn’t work, the new, old, neat, stylish interface won’t fix it.

I did not make that spin. If you think I did then it was misinterpreted. I commented on an earlier post about changes in the UI.

RickStep wrote:

My guess is that the experienced software individuals at Acronis were either recruited away, got pissed off with current management, were retired by the company or retired on their own and the result is that Acronis has lost valuable resources that they could not afford to lose and had no plan in place to correct the problem, by offering incentives, hiring equivalent resources from other companies or finding new graduates with expertise in “dying program resources”.

This is your perception but not the reality.

Last but not least the lack of my replies on some of the points you made doesn’t mean that I’m ignoring them. This may be true for some but for the others, I’m weighting different options
Thanks
A.

Alain wrote:

Hi Richard - no I'm not loosening the reins yet. Regarding the installer that should be redesign, we will consider that for the next release. I can't say at this stage if this will make it or not. But what do you mean exactly by services ? if you do not use T&D for instance, then nothing is activated. The driver was installed but is not used.

I'm suggesting the end user should be able to chose which of those service features s/he wishes to install in the first place. But, as a minimal alternative to that preferred approach, it should be possible to disable unwanted services within the main TIH application's configuration interface. In other words, it shouldn't be necessary for the end user to go to the Windows Managment Interface (WMI) services listings in order to control their auto-start behavior which is set by default during the current installation process.

Alain wrote:

Richard - I'm sorry you are taking this way. If you read actually again my post you will see that the UI consideration issues was only 1 paragraph out of many. My reply started by some statements about quality. I can undersand your frustration and that you do not want to believe. Are things perfect today ? no otherwise I would not take the time to post and reply. Now time will tell.

How I'm "taking it" isn't really important, Alain. Obviously, I have no way of knowing exactly what circumstances lie behind the initial release fiasco. In any case, I'm an old geezer whose perpectives probably don't matter much in the longer term anyhow. I can only say, having seen many such issues come and go over the years, that this one has engendered unprecedented "loss of faith" in my experience. Whatever the underlying reasons, it demands a correspondingly high level of response IMO. Your initial answer here seemed to me both belated and overly defensive in the circumstances. As you say, only time will reveal the rest of the reliability/promotional priorities story. I sincerely hope for everyone's sake that it turns out for the best, but I'll be "hedging my bets" for a while at least, and I strongly suspect that I'm not alone.

It’s clear that well-developed arguments for extending the ’30 day’ policy have been posted in this thread.

While folks from Acronis have responded to individual points, in no way has the original request been addressed adequately.

For those of us who paid $$ in good faith (and lived with 2012 as a result), the request is simple, direct and easy to implement. Why the silence? If it’s no, just say no.

Personally, I believe a negative response would demonstrate a clear lack of service towards your customers. But the continued silence also sends a clear message --- lack of respect.

Richard Virtue wrote:

I'm suggesting the end user should be able to chose which of those service features s/he wishes to install in the first place. But, as a minimal alternative to that preferred approach, it should be possible to disable unwanted services within the main TIH application's configuration interface. In other words, it shouldn't be necessary for the end user to go to the Windows Management Interface (WMI) services listings in order to control their auto-start behavior which is set by default during the current installation process.

Alain Gentilhomme,

Alain,

There are many users (including myself) which share the request above to enable the user to choose which options to be installed. Richard is not the first to write such a request and it has been posted on both this and the Wilders forum for prior versions.

After each installation of any 2012 builds plus many of the builds for 2011, the first thing I do is to disable the non-stop backup and the sync options. The second thing I do is to clear away all the old backup tasks which the program searches for and puts on my desktop. If I want an old backup to be accessible, I would rather choose it myself.

All of us realize it is impossible to release a new version without some issues but the more feature added, the more problems. Many of us would like more time spent on fixing the issues and less time adding new features. Many of us would not be adverse to different versions having different feature and let the user choose which version based on their needs. For myself, I simply want a program which will perform reliable backups and error free restores.

Thank you.
GroverH

Ed Benack wrote:

Hi Rick,

Thank you for reaching out. I was not able to find any cases associated with your email address. Could you let me know which specific issues you encountered and we will be happy to have a Support Professional assist.

Alain Gentilhomme, our Head of Development wanted to respond separately and will do so.

We do understandably receive feedback about the 30 day support policy. We had unbounded support years ago. Unfortunately, it was subject to abuse as we became essentially a general HelpDesk for some Customers as well as a substitute for the User Guide. At the price point we sell our consumer products, it became untenable, not because of technical issues but general inquiries related and unrelated to the product. At that time, we also did a competitive analysis of support offerings and derived an offering that reflected the normal range for the industry. We actually are conducting the same exercise again currently.

As Colin mentioned, we do offer perpetual recovery support. That’s our business and we would never turn our back on Customers. Additionally, if you have an issue that is a confirmed bug, we will refund the Pay Per Incident (PPI) fee. To be completely transparent, the PPI we charge is actually less half than our cost to handle a case. We are not trying to make money on Support. Our goal is simply to prevent misuse and to ensure a clear runway for Customers with pressing issues. We have had Customers with up to 50 cases, with none of them being in any way a severe technical issue. (e.g. didn’t like GUI or how something worked) We also found that most issues (>85%) Customers encountered issues were within the first 30 days of purchase with the vast majority being “how to” questions. Unfortunately, we also discovered that the need for support beyond that was largely driven by additional installations of the same license on additional machines.

With activation, this becomes much less of an issue and may allow us to adapt our current policies.

As a percentage of licenses in production and relative to the industry average, the number of issues is rather small; however, we understand that is of little solace to those who do have issues. In a forum, you definitely see the issues in a concentrated form and it is not the best representation of the product. That said, we know we can do better and we will.

Thank you for your feedback.

Ed

Hogwash, especially that bold text. After 30 days it is next to impossible to contact Acronis for support. My support issue, reported within 30 days, was promptly dropped and forgotten. This '30 day sentence' left me without a way to easily contact support without raising a PPI case. It took pressure in the forums to get in contact with support again and it took much more effort than it should have. Your 30 day model abandons all your new customers before they can even utilize a fraction of the software.

I invite you to read the thread '28782: Support? What support?' I was abandoned before the the 30 day support period. Your justifications for withdrawing support are lame at best. There are a number of safeguards you could have implemented to prevent abuse of your support system.

You know you can do better? I see no evidence of that. Acronis...you're not listening...you're dictating. Dictators get toppled.

A post from another thread:

Yana wrote:

Hello all,

Thank you for your comments, and feedback, even negative one. Rest assured it's all been forwarded to the management team, and got their attention.

joschi4, we're deeply sorry for the situation you've faced with support. Your situation got Directors attention, and we will make sure it never happens again.

We also have a representative of the next level of support contact you for a remote session and fixing the remains of the product within next 24 hours.

Please contact me via PM in case of any procrastination from support's side or any questions.

Thank you.

Hey, Yana.. what about those of us that held out for fix(es) and lost our support? Have the directors not caught on that there are HUNDREDS of people in this forum that desperately need support.. many of them specifically with uninstalling the product.. the same issue that you said that this person is going to get help with because he decided to uninstall the product in the first 30 days?

What about those of us that didn't bail in the first 30 days? What are we suppose to do? Support is only free for backup/restore issues. WHAT ABOUT THE REST OF US???????????

Ed Benack wrote:

Hi Rick,

Thank you for reaching out. I was not able to find any cases associated with your email address. Could you let me know which specific issues you encountered and we will be happy to have a Support Professional assist.

Ed,
Sorry, but I cut the rest of the "dog and pony show" because of several key points:

1. Whose fault is it that your tech people were helping people with "Windows 101"? Even a 1st level support person should know how to deal with issues not dealing with the product without burning much time. If not, you're not paying your staff enough.

2. You commented on how you had "Customers with up to 50 cases, with none of them being in any way a severe technical issue." What's wrong with that? That's why support tickets typically have a priority code. Just because those 50 cases may have not been "severe" doesn't in any way mean that they are not "technical issues".

3. You mentioned that 85% of your customer base experiences problems in the first 30 days. If that is true, that means you are purposely forsaking 15% of your customer base! How can anyone think that is in any way a good ratio?

4. If so many of these support cases were "was largely driven by additional installations of the same license on additional machines", why did you support them? I have had a license number since version 8.0.. you would have seen people calling in repeatedly with the same license number. It didn't take some half-baked registration scheme to stop that.. only tech support people that paid attention to abnormal support activity from the same license.

5. Your support people currently spend an insane amount of time on issues. I've been working with PCs since their introduction, yet the technician still insisted on taking over my computer.. turning a 5 minute support call into a 30 minute nightmare. All I needed was a list of instructions, but your tech insisted on wasting both of our time. Nobody can sustain a support organization like that. You went from one unsustainable business model to another.

6. Sure, you say that the support fee will be refunded if the customer has a "confirmed bug", but that is so open to interpretation that you have know real way to know if you're going to get that money back or not. Add the fact that confidence is not high with your support right now and you have a bunch of people that simply are not going to call. It's not worth the risk to pay YOU to report a bug in YOUR software.

7. Charging for support is bad enough.. there have been a number of complaints in the forums that people could not even understand the people they were talking to.. and paying for it!

Your extremely open support of the past was commendable but, as you say, not sustainable.. especially as your software gets released with more and more bugs. You NEED a simple way for people to report bugs.

This is simply a case of using the wrong support business model.. which is NOT the fault of the customers. I could go into how a piece of software as important as disaster recovery should never leave the door without being absolutely bullet-proof, but you know that. But the answer is not to have a "knee-jerk" reaction, shut yourself off from the world and alienate 15% of your customers, but to adapt (especially on the heals of a release like 2012).

So here are some ideas for you:

1. Open back up support after the 30 day period.. but only email through a form (and possibly online chat). Use real helpdesk software (it's worth the money). Also, by using email, you eliminate many of the communication problems that come with supporting an international product.

2. Have the user select the severity of the issue. When it hits the tech, let them decide if it is correct.. and change it if needed (I think you will find most people are honest about the severity level of their issue. Not all, but most). Then route the ticket to the correct people based on severity (i.e. feature requests go to development, low priority request go to the inexperienced techs and "emergency" requests, after being confirmed by 1st level support, get routed straight to 2nd level support).

3. Requests for basic system support should be referred to Microsoft. No need to learn their KBs (although knowing the biggies would be nice).. just point them to www.microsoft.com/support with a boilerplate letter that says something like "Sorry but your request falls outside of our support. You will need to contact Microsoft to resolve this particular issue."

4. Quit wasting your tech's time with all these system "takeovers".. it is FAR to time consuming (and quite annoying for those of us that know Windows). For common problems, write concise instruction and send them to the user. If they don't understand it, refer them to #3 above.

5. Do away with this faulty activation system you have. One of your "MVPs" mentioned in another thread that the software was bought from a 3rd party vendor and does not perform as advertised. That's a black eye on you, not them. If the concern is really the number of people asking for support for the same license on diffenent computers, stop them. Just write a program that will mine the support tickets and look for a high number of similar issues from the same license. It wouldn't take long to tweak it to start identifying abusers on its own. Online activation is the bane of honest users.. and it doesn't really stop piracy (but then again, that's not why you said you were using it).

6. Don't wait until after the product comes out to put up documentation. I can't tell you how many error messages took me to an empty KB page. Whack.. another black eye that should not be happening.

7. Release instructions on how to safely remove 2012 from your system! There are people out there spending hundreds of hours trying to figure out how to fully remove 2012 because tech support won't tell us!

You mentioned that your company has realized it has problems, but they're really not that hard to fix.. I've seen it done correctly (and incorrectly) too many times. It just takes a commitment from management to understand the changes that need to be made and to have to backbone to make them (because it sure seems like Acronis' tech support needs a top-to-bottom shake-down). The end result is a more efficent tech support and happier customers. After all, you did say that a full 15% of your customers experience problems after the support period ends. There is no decent IT manager in the world that would think that was an acceptable number.. especially on such a critical piece of software!

Of course the problem goes farther than that.. vers 8, 9 and 10 virtually had no bugs to speak of. Someone needs to go back and see what happened starting with ver 2010 and start a post-mortum on what is going wrong in development. I know that QA departments have been cut way back (as is virtually out of existance), but with software as critical as disaster recover, QA is essential. Regression testing.. the whole nine yards. I don't know if that is what happened at Acronis, but something bad definately happened after version 10. Upper management needs to figure out what it was and fix it so that Acronis can start releasing the quality software that they use to be known for. And they need to do it SOON!

If you need proof, just look at the hit you're taking on Amazon's reviews.. and it is quickly getting worse (and moving to other sites, like Newegg). Someone up there in your company HAS to know the impact those reviews are going to have on future sales.

Does Acronis REALLY want to fall on the sword over something that I am presuming is either driven by somebody lacking real IT knowledge or by somebody's ego (or both)? I hope not.. but it would not be the first time it's happened (and it sure seems like someone in charge is losing touch with reality).

I really do hope that this in some way helps. I really am a fan of Acronis (if I wasn't, I wouldn't care about any of this).

Best of luck,
Rog