Customer Reviews

Acronis True Image 6.0

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I bought this product on the basis of its high user ratings. But I found many quirks that get in the way of it performing its simple tasks. The software, its documentation, and Acronis's website don't answer some obvious questions. What's worse is that there is no telephone support for installation and first use, with a tepid promise of an e-mail tech support response in 48 hours. Here are some of the many quirks that put stumbling blocks in the way of easy use: 1) Right out of the box, the serial number isn't on the diskette envelope but gets lost in a collection of papers including advertising and a slim user manual that has no alphabetized subject index. The serial number location is not revealed in any versions of the product manual or help functions. I stumbled across it and was finally able to install it. 2) Online registration didn't "take" when I didn't fill out one field. I selected Back to re-enter the information and got an error message that my serial number had already been registered. Then I received an e-mail notice that registration was successful. 3) I then attempted to create a disk image on an HP CD-Writer, formatting disks with the lite version of EasyCDCreator 5.0. Acronis cranked for 20 minutes, acting as if it were recording the image on the disk. Then it spit out the disk with an error message that my media may be faulty. I was able to record a file on the same disk using Windows Explorer. But, there is nothing in any of the documentation to tell the user what type of disk format is required. So, I tried this with both CD-R and CD-RW, with no luck. An e-mail to tech support was answered the next day with the suggestion that I insert a blank disk. I did that, but the product didn't recognize an unformatted disk. 4) I finally used the Acronis Rescue Media Builder to create a disk. However Media Builder must be restarted after formatting each disk, even though 7 are required for my disk image. It now seems to be working, but this shouldn't be so hard! 4) The documentation has many grammatical errors that read as if it has never been gone over by a technical writer. If the company allows this many errors in functionality and documentation, how clean is their code? Can I count on it working if my hard drive crashes? When I shell out [$$$]for utility software, I want and expect documentation and functionality that makes it easy to use. I expect the standard telephone support and comprehensive online troubleshooting guides offered by other software manufacturers. This product has the look and feel of a beta test, not version 6.0.

This software is outstanding. I never thought I'd need to use imaging software, but bought it for the purpose of helping me migrate between old and new disk drives. Little did I know that the images that I created would be used to completely restore my system when it crashed a few weeks later due to a nasty XP IP stack problem (another story entirely). Both imaging and restoral was extremely fast (a 15GB restoration took less than 30 minutes -- to a completely bootable, operational machine)!

Both the imaging process and the restoral were absolutely flawless with True Image. Furthermore, the software is extremely well executed, making the myriad choices that are required to to specify the backup/restore operations a piece of cake. The ease of use and attention to detail present in this software bring to mind other classic "must have" utilities, such as Power Quest's Partition Magic and WinZip. Now, if only companies like Symantec, Network Associates, and Microsoft would follow suit...

I cannot speak highly enough of Acronis True Image. It is truly exceptional software that I will not do without in the future. Well worth the price.

The application works as advertised!
I've installed it on a Windows Home XP, created a bootable recovery CD (there is also a bootable floppy option) and proceeded to backup and compress my main hard disk to a secondary one.
I was able to mount the backup volume like a virtual drive and navigate the volume. This offers an additional option over a full restore, just pick a file(s) or directory and copy it.
I suggest not backing up to the same hard disk but to a second physical one, not to be confused with an additional drive created with a partition.

This is the third time I am writing. I had all kinds of problems running this program. But the email response was quick and solved the problems. The program is working well. I mention that I tried it on my backup computer and that I couldn't get it to work there either. Even though you are suppose to install it on only one computer, they helped me get it running on that one also. They responed in less than 24 hours.

I have two complete sets of image CDs for my system burned on two different burners (and verified) on two different brands of media. My XP system got hosed-up (lsass.exe issue) and I figured I'd break out the old DI6 boot CD and just re-image. Surprise, it can read the last CD in order to select that archive to restore from, but it can't read either CD1 and justs posts an error that the media may be of poor quality. In addition, it reset the hard drive partition (all is lost) prior to ever checking to see if you had media and that it was readable. So now, you can't try to just re-install XP, you have to format and rebuild from scratch.

Acronis True Image 6.0 delivers outstanding features at a surprisingly low price. True Image's ability to write to recordable DVDs and its image creation of system disks within Windows will tip the scale for some. But if you're looking for scheduling features, partition creation, and disk-to-disk copying, stick with PowerQuest Drive Image.

I looked at all the popular image software and even some not so popular that are available on the web. This software gave me more bang for the buck with my Win98 OS and is rated favorably by software evalution sites. I'm a novice computer user and I've created and restored images of my entire hard drive several times while resolving an unrelated software problem. I can create an image to another hard drive in my computer, to an external hard drive or to my wifes pc which is connected to mine through a network cable. I haven't created images to CD's though. I've had no problems, the software is very easy to use and straight forward. What a relief it is to know you won't ever have to reinstall all your programs again and that your important pictures and files are safe! There's also a 30 day money back guaranty, -see their website. My PC is a PIII 500mhz, Win98SE with 3- Western Digital hard drives: 2-40G & 1-80G external. Full disclosure: I know this review sounds suspiciously rosy compared to some others, I'm not a company cheerleader just a blue collar worker bee from Long Beach. I have no problem condemning things that don't work.

Loaded in the program and tried to re-boot. Couldn't. Contacted Acronis by email. Fast response. Two files replaced in safe mode. Didn't work. Two more. They worked. But, the rest of the story. While this was going on, I tried the program on my unused backup computer. Didn't work. Even the replacement files didn't work. I have a friend who said he would try it. It didn't work. Not even with the new files. I am keeping my old backup program backing up the TrueImage, just in case.

I bought this product and returned it two weeks later. I will give Acronis credit for having a no-questions-asked 30-Day refund policy.

Here are my reasons (copied from a support forum I posted to):

I consider myself burned because I trusted PC Magazine's high rating of this product too much and have been extremely disappointed as a result. Instead of investing time to find some reasonable open-source alternative or to make sure all the features I expected were present and functional, I just ponied up the $50 (or whatever) to buy TI version 7.0. Mistake, so far.

Here are my complaints:
1. No partial backup/filtering feature. Foolishly, I assumed that the software would give me the flexibility to mark portions of the filesystem to be included in the backup. No dice. I understand that Acronis considers entire-disk backup/cloning/restoration to be their sweet spot, but the lack of this feature makes the software far less attractive to the home user, in my opinion.
2. Massive size of incremental backup images! After an initial full backup that was 13 GB big, I hoped for daily incremental backups that were in the tens of MB range. No! Instead, I get seemingly random sizes anywhere between 100 MB and 1 GB (so far). At first, I thought I could rectify this by taking point 1 above into consideration. So, I moved everything within reason off of my target partition (including, laboriously, Documents and Settings, in an effort to avoid things like my browser caches) and made sure that the partition Windows lives on is no longer included in the backup. The result? Slightly smaller file sizes, but not much. I'm still anywhere between 100 and 500 MB every night. Obviously no good for nightly "incremental" backups.
3. Support. First I was disappointed because the only FAQ or support info Acronis offers is entirely pre-sales focused. Sorry, Acronis, but it's really worthless from a post-sales perspective! The manual is OK, but it's long on peripheral info (do we really need another source of information on disk partition structure?) and short on real rubber-meets-road usage information. To top this off, I formally wrote a support request to Acronis tech support on 6/7 and finally received a reply over one week later. By then, I had already figured out everything except the file size issue, and the answer I received did nothing more than restate the "sectors, not files" point I've already read here a bunch of times. I would suggest a formal KnowledgeBase (an honest Support FAQ instead of a Marketing FAQ) to house some of these more frequent "answers," instead of relying on 1-1 e-mail or this forum.

My situation is simple: I have a large second hard drive and I want nightly incremental backups of my primary drive written there. Surely that is a common need? If I really have 500 MB worth of sector changes happening in one day's time, then I don't think that sector-based incremental backup is a very good approach for the product to take. It's not really very incremental, is it, when the "increments" represent massive chunks of the hard drive?

I made my own bed here by not doing more homework, but I honestly would like to ditch the product and get my money back at this point. I suppose I'll try to call and make this request, but I don't have high expectations. I am 100% confident that there are many other superior choices out there at this time--and probably some of them free to boot.

To demonstrate that I have some sense of balance here, I will say that this is probably a good product for basic users, in the sense that the UI is friendly. However, I would imagine that even basic users would benefit greatly from a filtering feature. And who wouldn't want the smallest files possible when doing incremental backups?

I'm a software consultant so I run brand-name software on an IBM Thinkpad computer with Windows2000 and a vanilla but loaded system.

Bad News: Completely hosed my system when it went to make the CD. After that, no files came up in Add/Remove programs. Internet was suddenly read/only. Had to reformat my hard drive / replace my OS. After doing that, we put in CD to restore data and it crashed my system completely. So we had to reformat again. Luckily I had everything backed up by hand on an external hard disk (the point of buying this software in the first place). While it is obviously my configuration or they would be out of business, what a nightmare!

Good News: I had no interest in tech support, just getting my money back. Rarely have I had such a customer-friendly experience of getting a refund.