Support case lost in limbo
After reading through some of the comments regarding TIH 2012 I decided it's best to post here as no one will have time to read anything else.
I've had a support case open since January 2011 regarding TIH 2011. I don't even know which the original case number is as it has been automatically closed and reopened a few times.
Case 01401990] Re: Acronis Support Case 01034557 Subject: TI2011
in[ref:00D3Zcb.5005BVPyW:ref] [ ref:00D3Zcb.5005EX6bb:ref ]
After five months of new techies every time the support case time limit came up I gave up. I told support I've spent enough time on this, refund me or I'm even willing to wait until TIH 2012 and try one last time installing that. Repeated that request on 23rd of November (been out of the country).
Have been running xxcopy for almost a year, tried another product as well which I'll switch to if I have to... but when TIH works it works better than most products I've tried even with all the bugs and hopeless dumbing downs they have made.
I guess having 3-4-5 or whatever licenses I have isn't good enough for any support common sense. Upgrade his two TIH 2011 licenses for free, let him have one more go, then refund if things are still hopeless.
I finally got a reply, thank you very much. The moderators/employees here seem to be the most responsive of the whole bunch.
Unfortunately the reply was that I can get neither a free upgrade or a refund since the case is so sold. Considering the first support case was opened within the initial support month I find the response unacceptable.
Considering the money involved is peanuts and not getting a free upgrade for my two last licenses, which might have still made me excited enough to try the newest version, did not happen I'll just switch to the other backup software I had to test anyway to survive.
Dear Peter,
I've come across your feedback in this thread and sent you an update on this matter personally. An engineer will be reaching you shortly to carry out my suggestions - and please feel free to get back to us with any other questions.
Thank you,
Alexander
After Brajkin got involved the issue processed much better through the red tape. So as far as I'm concerned I'm happy with the end result although the resolution time made me switch to another software for most of the year.
I'll add two more comments at this stage since they might be helpful to other users. One about the original error and one about my backup strategy (which I since have reverted to because a simple backup approach that works beats any other solution).
1) The original problem I had showed up as the following in the installation logs:
"Acronis True Image Home 2011 -- Error 1935. An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.VC80.CRT..."
Windows 7 home premium, no service pack.
After a lot of hunting this was due to something dodgy in the registry preventing the installation of some vc2008 component. The problem was not visible in any other products except when installing patches to vc2005, vc2008 and Windows 7 sp1. I spent some time on MSDN trying to get the issue resolved but never came across a tech with enough knowledge to get further into the issue. The replies were of the same standard as most of Acronis tech support usually, read from faq, copy/paste, close case as soon as possible :).
HOWEVER, once I got my Trueimage Home 2012 it installed without a glitch. Maybe the libraries used are now newer or whatever but the main thing is, all those people having this problem might manage to get by it by installing 2012 instead.
2) Backup strategy. After a year of manual and shady backups I decided to revert back to my old and trusted backup strategy. It takes a bit more effort to set up but after two Windows corruptions in one year I thought it was best to go back to something simple and foolproof. With all the bugs reported about TI2012 this feels safer too. Some details listed below in case it would help other people.
One small partition set aside for a windows backup only partition, no other software installed than TIH2009-2012 depending on machine. All Windows installations installed on ~60G partitions. Games, applications, data and backup installed on separate partitions. The main reason for doing this is that now I take a full backup of the windows partitions once per week by booting. No hassle about what has been installed elsewhere, the backups are only 10-20G in size and reverting back to an older version in case Windows does some corruption magic is a breeze. Although power outages are rare I don't want to see another power loss and subsequent chkdsk with lots of errors touching my data anymore.
Games, apps, data backed up as full/incrementals as usual.
Long term data (music libraries, images etc) backed up as yearly full/daily incrementals and kept for a very long time.
Hello all,
as we would like to keep our dialogs constructive, we're locking this thread. Please feel free to refer to this thread in case of any procrastination with reply from support side or issues contacting the technical department.
Thank you.