TIH 2010 very User unfriendly / Not for "Home" Users
It seems that we are also one of the many TIH Users that are extremely unhappy with the 2010 incarnation of TIH. We have now totally uninstalled and re-installed 3 times now to try and get a clean install and decent performance.
One of our backup's has been running for 5 hours now and I just opened up the 'status' window to see what was happening and noticed that there is nothing to indicate what task is actually running! The task name is not shown anywhere and the name of the backup file is the actual filename mask that I told TIH to use - which uses the @machine@, @date@, @time@ and @task symbols. (See attached)
TIH stands for "True Image Home" with the "Home" meaning it is meant to be used by your average "Joe Public" user and not just IT Professionals. I am the latter and even I find this total lack of friendliness (+ many other things with the 2010 version) extremely annoying.
Acronis - can you somehow show us Users evidence that this and other issues are actually receiving some true and honest attention from your Support and Development Team(s) - otherwise I can easily imagine that there will mass exodus from TIH in the very near future.
Your Competitors are watching and waiting.
Steve
ITMetrics Ltd
I think it's unfair to say he's being lazy. Frustrated is more like it.
Used in very simple ways, ATI can be easy for many users, but it very often requires users to take steps that is beyond the prowess of the average user. For, example, sometimes uninstalls are required that require manual manipulation of the registry.
And each year when ATI comes out with a new version, some of us that have been using it for years have to ask each other, in the new version, how do you do this, or that, - something we new well in the older versions.
So there are reasons other than laziness to say that it can be difficult to use.
I've been following backup software since I was a beta tester for Norton Backup (yes a DOS program) more than two decades ago. Since then, I've noticed a few things
-- all users should review the manual before using backup software. That's not true for all software; some you can just walk up to cold and it's pretty obvious how it works.
-- Reliance on backup software requires closer attention and often greater technical expertise and that one reason why most users (at least the ones I've come across or know about) don't do any kind of backup at all. So there are reasons other than laziness to say that program difficulty will dissuade potential users.
Steve,
I was very happy with TIH2009, but had to upgrade to TIH2010 when I switched to Windows 7. I had a few problems initially with TIH2010 and concluded that the best solution was a clean reinstall as follows: 1. run Acronis' Cleanup utility for TIH2010; 2. run Revo Uninstaller to get rid of what is left; 3. reinstall.
TIH2010 is now running very reliably for me.
It seems that we are also one of the many TIH Users that are extremely unhappy with the 2010 incarnation of TIH. We have now totally uninstalled and re-installed 3 times now to try and get a clean install and decent performance.One of our backup's has been running for 5 hours now and I just opened up the 'status' window to see what was happening and noticed that there is nothing to indicate what task is actually running! The task name is not shown anywhere and the name of the backup file is the actual filename mask that I told TIH to use - which uses the @machine@, @date@, @time@ and @task symbols. (See attached)
TIH stands for "True Image Home" with the "Home" meaning it is meant to be used by your average "Joe Public" user and not just IT Professionals. I am the latter and even I find this total lack of friendliness (+ many other things with the 2010 version) extremely annoying.
Acronis - can you somehow show us Users evidence that this and other issues are actually receiving some true and honest attention from your Support and Development Team(s) - otherwise I can easily imagine that there will mass exodus from TIH in the very near future.
Your Competitors are watching and waiting.
Steve
ITMetrics Ltd
I believe Acronis has an updated cleanup utility available now. So a third party product shouldn't be needed.
With backup software, or any software that installs its own hardware drivers, it's a good idea to use msconfig to remove all nonwindows services and all astartup programs from startup, reboot, do your uninstalls/installs, then use msconfig to return to a normal startup. This avoids some otherwise difficult probs. Also, if a prob suddenly shows up when you return to normal startup, you know it's program/driver conflict and you can probably locate it by adding back to startup one thing at a time.
If your backup is taking longer than aobut 1/2 to 1 minute per gigabyte, then you probably have a problem and the backup isn't working but is hung.
Some exceptions would be when you pc is treating a drive as USB 1 (very slow) or moving bits over a network and the network is throttling large moves. But generally a minute per Gig is good rule of thumb.
. . .One of our backup's has been running for 5 hours now . . .
True Image is extremely picky when it comes to hardware. Imperfections that Windows will happily ignore will make True Image do weird things including not work altogether. If a backup is taking unduly long, I would run chkdsk /r on the destination drive. Marginal memory may also cause this.
I would also run chkdsk /r on the source drive as well. TI is quite tolerant of file system imperfections but every now and then something will cause it to misbehave.
Thanks for all the comments - whether supportive or not :-)
The "backup" phase of the "backup+validate" I referred to eventually took some 6hours and 24 minutes for a partition that was 256GB in size with around 60GB free.
This sounds somewhat excessive - but I will check the drive for errors. The target drive is on our 100MB network and is brand new.
I will report back later with more news.
Steve
I forgot to mention that my original 'gripe' was related to the lack of information on the status page as to which actual task was running and which file the backup was creating.
No substituion of the @machine@, @task@ etc was being made in the status page itself - although the actaul backup file was correctly named.
Steve
If I assume your backup was about 200GB and if I allow 2 min/GB then it should take about 400min which is 400/60=6.6hrs. What is killing your time is the 100Mbps network - compare it to a USB 2 connection which is rated at 480Mbps and that is slower than say SATA1 at 1.5Gbps.
Acronis is not famous for their attention to small details and some big ones as well. The display of the variables as the filename is very, very poor attention to detail in the testing phase.
The name of the file being backed up while an image is being created is perhaps not so straightforward since TI is backing up sectors which do not necessarily correspond to any single file at the time.
Thanks for that feedback - I agree it is the network that is slowing the backup down.
It is not the individual file names that I am interested in seeing in the status window, it is the correct resolved name of the actual backup file that it being created.
Just for the record: USB 2 speed rating of 480 mbps (57.2 MB/s) is a maximum theoretical burst speed and includes all the overhead in the data packets. Actual steady data transfer rates max out typically at less than half that, about 20MB/s to 25MB/s, and typical speeds depending on your particular hardware are usually even slower than that, often about half or 10MB/s.
Yes, all of the numbers are the theoretical ones used for "advertizing".
Where is this "Clean Up the UnInstall" utility available?
ATIH has basically hosed my most recent Win7 install... Even Windows Backup has stopped working.
http://kb.acronis.com/content/14871
for the cleanup utility.
TIm,
If uninstalling ATI doesn't solve the control panel issue, try post #36 here http://forum.acronis.com/forum/14782
I found registry damage that was probably caused by the ATIH installer... the AcroVbus BACKUPHDD driver has embedded itself in not only the Hard Drive stack, but in the HD audio and another stack I didn't bother chasing. And I can't seem to fix it manually... can't remove the rogue keys even in safe mode after deleting their instantiations in the underlying keys.
Also, after the uninstall and Windows Backup was "broken", I was able to find the backup app and running it rebuilt the control panel. But I'm still missing links in the start menus.
