Customer Reviews

Acronis True Image 11 Home [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(89)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(56)

 

 

A couple of months ago there was a power outage, and even though my UPS kicked in, the auto-shutdown software didn't. When I tried to reboot, there was a Blue Screen of Death waiting for me. I tried everything from reinstalling XP, to recovery console, safe mode, BIOS fiddling, nothing worked.

I didn't have any backups, so I was out of luck. But as I went through the incredibly time consuming drudgery of reinstalling Windows and 50 or so other programs that I had on my original install, I kept thinking to myself, "there has to be a better way".

So I decided to spare no expense. My first purchase was a 2TB external hard-drive (split to 1TB with RAID 1), and my second was this software. And it works like a charm for my use (btw, I don't consider DVD backups to be a viable option).

The first step in backing up my new install was to establish a secure zone on my RAIDed drive (about 25 GB). This is a special partition invisible to the OS (and viruses, spyware, etc.) so it can't be accidentally deleted or modified. This was simple to do, and the hidden partition's size can be adjusted at any time.

I performed the initial backup with no problems. A previous reviewer mentioned that the green progress bar wasn't providing sufficient feedback. For my purposes, however, I don't back up individual sets of files or folders, I back up the entire hard drive, bit for byte, to include the MFTs and Boot sectors, etc. I don't need to see what's being copied at any given moment, because I already know its either a '0' or a '1'. Anyway, compression is decent (9 GB for 20 GB worth of files) and fast (usually 10-15 minutes to complete).

I've also set up a scheduled weekly backup which is done "incrementally" and only saves the changes from the original. TrueImage will automatically delete old backups to make room for new ones, as you begin to fill up your "secure zone".

I've actually begun to use this in lieu of "System Restore". I try to keep most of my regularly updated stuff on my RAIDed external drive now (I actually moved "My Documents" there) and anytime I have a serious problem I can actually restore the system to a previous state week by week. I've already done this 3 or 4 times in the past 2 months using a boot CD created by the software and it works flawlessly.

It's a good feeling to know that you can reverse any changes made to your system. There's even a feature called 'Try and Decide' that let's you do this in real-time and undo any changes made during an installation or other activity. If you're looking for a robust backup solution that perhaps doesn't involve backing up to CDs/DVDs, this software will work for you.

Here's a caveat: your mileage may vary! Reviews are reflective of individual preferences and experiences. In the case of software, especially for Windows, there are so many potential gotchas and hazards within each unique system that what is true and good for one system may be disaster for the next. In my case I have three computers and they are all different models, brands, versions of Windows, and my experience with installing the very same software on all three does not always result in the same outcome for all three.

With that said, my two cents' worth on Acronis v. 11 is --- DISASTER waiting to happen. Let me say up front that I've been in the I.T./I.S. biz since 1969, my most recent job was Director of Technology Services for a mid-size company. I know PCs and Windows. When I look for a new product to fulfill a need I always perform due diligence. I thought so, anyway. By process of elimination I decided to install the trial version of Acronis True Image Home v. 11. It installed fine, I set everything up for a full backup three times a week of two SCSI drives. Everything *seemed* to run fine (silly me!) so I purchased the program. After a couple of weeks I decided to dig into the files within the backup archives. Lo and behold, it appeared the only real full backup I actually got was the very first one. Oh, the program claimed that it was faithfully backing up both of my entire hard drives (not a sector-by-sector backup but a full disk file backup) with no errors, and I was feeling pretty secure. So after not seeing any actual files within the archives for subsequent backups, I opened a trouble ticket with Acronis tech support.

My troubleshooting skills are excellent but between Acronis and me, we couldn't get to the bottom of the problem. It was always "try this, try that, try something else." To make matters even worse, the program stopped working at all -- I started getting an error of "unable to create volume snapshot" during the initiation of the backup, and it wouldn't even try to back up. The solution from Acronis was to advise that I stop running various essential programs, such as my anti-virus, anti-spyware, and Norton's GoBack. They seemed oblivious to the fact that Acronis backed everything up fine the very first time. Sigh.

Acronis support also wanted me to completely uninstall Acronis and reinstall. I did so twice, which was quite time consuming, because as any techie knows, you still must go into the Windows registry and clean up debris and clutter that's left over. After wasting about six weeks of troubleshooting with Acronis, I had to give up and move on. I obviously didn't do my homework when searching for a robust backup solution. I found out after the fact, from user comments on various tech forums, that if you have a "complex" system, Acronis is not good at emergency restores and often cannot even boot from the recovery CD. Okay, lesson learned the hard way. At least the program wasn't all that expensive, but gee, I really hated to give up. I will say their support was a little slow to respond initially (it's only via e-mail) but once they started assisting me they were very quick to respond. When I didn't get back to them within a couple of days they always re-contacted me and asked that I update them with my progress.

I'm now running a trial of StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop 3.2. So far, so good, it works flawlessly, does full, incremental and differential backups. You can schedule any type of backup to run automagically at any time. I ran one full backup of both hard drives and I run differential backups two times a day, every day. Yep, I checked, the files are really being backed up.

Another difference between these two programs is that Acronis, like most other backup/recovery programs, creates a Linux bootable recovery CD. From what I can discern this can cause problems with "difficult" systems. On the other hand, StorageCraft's software creates an emergency CD that runs a basic version of Windows Vista, which means you'll have many more drivers available for those pesky difficult systems, like mine.

Buyer beware! This was $35 down the drain for me.

Update, 7/1/2008, about the StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop 3.2:
I highly recommend it although Amazon doesn't currently sell it. It works flawlessly, does incremental and full backups, as many times a day or week or month as you have room for on the backup device, supports many types of hardware for the backup media; the "bare metal" recovery CD is a Windows Vista OS, which means you'll have many more drivers available than if you have a Linux recovery CD. The term "bare metal" means your hard drive or Windows has died and you have to boot from a CD and essentially restore everything on the backup media. The backup software runs at any time of day or night, does its job super fast and with no errors. I am very pleased with StorageCraft; it's running on two of my PCs, one with WinXP Home, one with WinXP Pro that has two large SCSI hard drives. Finally I can relax and not worry about our backups.

I purchased this software to have a robust ability to restore my hard drive completely (not just user data) in the case of a drive failure. This is what the "image backup" functionality is for, to allow you to re-create a fully-operational version of your system very quickly in the event of a drive failure. (As opposed to just a data backup, which still requires you to reinstall the operating system, programs, and all your user settings again from scratch.)

So, here's my take:
1) First, any of the positive reviews that have not actually tried to use their backups to restore should really not be given much weight. If you can backup fine, but can't restore, what's the point?
2) I am running Windows Vista with a 1 TB drive, and this program worked fine in creating the image backup.
3) When my drive started throwing off errors, and I replaced it with a new one, I went to my Acronis boot CD to restore from my backup image (on an external drive.) Part way through the restore wizard, the restore program just froze, for no apparent reason. And I have been completely unable to restore my system from my backup.

Here is the experience I had with the technical support:
- You should know that by default, technical support is only available via email with a 48 hr response time. While this seems reasonable for only paying $40 for a software product, a 48-hour response time makes the product fairly meaningless in the event of a failure, as I can easily restore the operating system and programs from scrtach in less time than this (and just use the free built-in windows backup for a data restore).
- I went ahead and paid an extra $30 for a single-incident "premium support", which is real-time phone support. However, after 3 separate phone calls, each on hold for 20-30 minutes and NEVER getting a live person (I had to leave a messages), I finally received some email communications which contained solutions that made no impact to my issue.
- The Tech Support emails provided new "CD images" that they wanted me to use instead of my standard boot CD. (I'm not sure, but I doubt most folks have an extra PC and CD burner sitting around to be abe to do this, when their main PC is dead.)
- Then I received an email asking me to reformat a flash drive, plug it into my dead computer, and write a batch script that would execute numerous lines of Linux command line codes. Ok, I'm a pretty technical guy, but I'm not familiar with Linux. And if the solution to a restore problem requires "normal everyday users" who are buying this product for easy home backup/restore to program in Linux, I would suggest this product is not the right fit for most folks.

I would give this five stars but for a major problem. This problem is not unique with me, though I'm sure not everyone will have it. Compared to version 10, it's very good in that when you press F11, you can immediately get the graphic interface and begin your restore. That was not the case with version 10. That's where it ends.

When I install version 11, I immediately lose my file sharing across my network. I've followed all the things to do provided by Acronis and Microsoft to no avail. It looks as if I'll have to find another backup solution if I want to use my network, which I do.

The software works like a dream and is a lifesaver. But right now it's buggy.

In addition, as always, Acronis support is terrible. It just barely exists.

Update: I recovered my laptop with this software using a cloned image I made with version ten. It was fast and smooth and there were no problems. I did notice that in this version, it asked me for a login name and password. This was not in the previous version and I was a bit unsure of how to handle it. So I didn't put in a name but put in my image password. That seemed to be what it wanted as it went fine.

But that said, there should be an area in the software that calls for a login name if a restore asks for it. I can't find any such area of the software.

I have used this product for almost five years. I used many other PC backup products prior to this and was impressed by the simplicity of the Trueimage interface, the fact that it would do both drive image backup (for restoring an entire partition) as well as file backup. It was also MUCH faster than products I previously used from Stomp and Seagate.

Over the years, I recommended this product to dozens of friends and clients, and actually looked forward to the chore of backing up.

But then, Acronis lost its way.

Somewhere around version 9, the backups I created sometimes would not "validate" (a feature built into Trueimage to tell you whether your backup is going to be able to restore). And then, one day when disaster struck and I had to restore for real, I found out that the image backup of my boot drive was "corrupt" and I was unable to restore. Fortunately, I had another image backup that I had created a few weeks earlier and was able to use that.

I then spent the next year working with Acronis tech support and posting on their forums trying to get an answer. What I found is that dozens and dozens and dozens of other people are having the exact same problem. Acronis tells everyone that it is due to faulty RAM, but everyone who has the problem goes ahead and runs the MEMTEST32 program, finds out that their RAM is perfectly fine, and are then left hung out to dry. (To be fair a very small percentage find out they do have a RAM problem, so this is not entirely a red herring - although it is pretty close to that).

So, what you have here is a fantastic, dynamite product, with all the features, speed, and user interface you could ever hope to have, sold at a reasonable price, but with a fatal flaw that renders it unusable to a sizable percentage of its intended market.

So go ahead and buy it (better yet, download the trial) and see if it works on your computer. Make sure to select the "validate" option so that you can tell if the backup you just made has any chance of being restored. If you get the message that the archive is corrupt, do NOT purchase this product because it is going to be nothing but a headache.

The Acronis tech support people were slow, but ultimately responsive, and did try to help, but it has become clear that they know they have a problem, and that their engineering team is unwilling or simply unable to provide a fix to the flaws they have let creep into this wonderful program.

In years past I used software such as Norton Ghost. In that circumstance I paid nearly twice as much for that product as this one cost. The results of each product are as stark as their price difference was. I never did get NG to work properly and thank heavens I checked it prior to a real hard drive emergency.

On the other hand, Acronis 11 worked like a dream, and trust me, I was skeptical of the functionality of this software from a little heard from company. In addition, anyone who has ever tried to clone an operating drive (the "C" drive) knows that it can be very tricky and often does not work due to hidden files not copying properly, partitions not being properly established, or files getting corrupted in the cloning process.

Well, let me tell you, I just cloned my 320 gig "C" drive with 180 gigs of data, files, and programs on it to a server quality 750 gig hard drive which then became my new "C" drive. The result on my XP system was flawless. My machine booted without a hitch and every program worked as if nothing otherwise happened. The program was very easy to use and was very intuitive.

I have purchased many utility software products in the past that promised a lot on the box and frustratingly never worked anywhere near what the box claimed the program would do. Acronis 11 worked like a dream. This has now become my main and trusted program for backing up my critical data. Highly recommended.

Although the program seems to be making a backup, the program is poorly designed. I do a simple vanilla backup to DVD each morning and it takes 12 steps! Run app. Click Backup and Restore. Click Manage Tasks. Click Daily backup. Click Start Task. It says "Scheduled task started" even though it was not a scheduled task. Wait 10 sec. The disk ejects (for no reason ... and even if the option to not eject is enabled). Click OK. The disk retracts. Backup occurs. Disk ejects (for no reason). Push disk back in. Click to continue. Backup finishes. Close app. And you can't even minimize the app. during the backup. It's annoying to go thru these steps every day when the software could easily be designed to work in half the number of steps. And when the disk becomes full there is no option to span disks and the program gets into a strange state where you have to reboot the computer to allow the program to work properly again. And this software fills up about 10 times the space of my prior backup utility requiring far more frequent disk changes and hence cost. If the programmers can't even handle the most basic error of disk full, can't develop an efficient sequence for the most vanilla of backup types and wastes a huge amount of disk space, it makes me wonder if my data is even safely backed up. As for support, they responded to my emails but I got no resolution to a simple question after several rounds.

I bought True Image instead of Norton Ghost, since it seems to do a similar job for less money. I was concerned about some of the bugs mentioned by Amazon reviewers, so I downloaded a free trial from the Acronis web site to make sure it would work OK on my computer. I successfully made a full backup without disabling my wireless file sharing or running into any other problems. I then bought the full program from Amazon (cheaper than activating the free trial on Acronis's web site). I had just reformatted my hard drive, and will keep a (hopefully error-free) backup made fairly soon after the reformat in addition to a more recent backup. I did make sure to make my baseline backup made AFTER I installed the full version of True Image -- I would hate to try to restore an initial backup and find that I then had only the trial version on my computer.
The first thing I did with this program was to restore all my data from a failing drive to a new one. This went flawlessly, and I was thrilled. I restored it again a few weeks after that when my display settings became corrupted (though in hindsight I could have just used System Restore), and it again performed without problems.
My main complaint so far is that the documentation is quite lacking in detail -- it outlines all the features in a general way, but I have had several questions along the way that I have not found an answer to. For example, when I restored the drive image to my new hard drive, I couldn't find out if I needed to format it first (the answer is no). Also, I excluded frequently changed files from my drive image (i.e., My Documents and especially my recorded TV files, but found that these files were backed up anyway because I had not specified *.* when I listed the paths of the files to exclude. Another problem I have encountered is that my incremental data backups (I am backing up data separately from the drive image) have been very large. When I looked at one, I found that many unchanged files had been backed up. I think that by specifying "My Documents" as a file to be backed up incrementally, that the whole file and all subfolders are backed up every time one file changes. I can't find documentation regarding this, and it's an annoying waste of space.
I haven't tried contacting Acronis support for any issue, so can't comment on it.
In all, I think this is a vast improvement over reformatting a hard drive (even if you have to wait 48 hours for the answer to a question from Acronis support, as one reviewer complained, you can use those 48 hours to do something other than work on your computer). I strongly recommend that you take advantage of the free trial from the Acronis website -- that's a risk-free way of finding out whether the program will work as intended on your system.

Backups are an essential part of maintaining a computer or a system. Yet too many people are secure (falsely) in the knowledge that the data on their hard drive is secure and will be available at any time.

Those who have worked with computers for some time know that this belief is far from being a fact. Hard drives fail....essentially all of them. And programs and data get corrupted either from an external source such as a virus or from the process of programs reading and writing to a hard disk. So, your data, at some point will not be available to you.

The only real protection is to back up that informtion. The data you have should be backed up frequently, and the programs on a regural basis, as well.

The products that promise to make this process easy are in the hundreds. Those that actually do the job are very few. Perhaps the best and most reliable program for secure backups is Symantec's GHOST. Symantec also bought a program called Drive Image and sold it for some time, eventually dropping that product in favor of its better selling GHOST.

Acronis is one of the few products that I have used and reviewed that work almost as well as GHOST, and do so with much less need for technical knowledge than such programs as GHOST. Its backups are simple to do, and the recovery process works very smoothly.

In particular, I like the fact that one can take an existing drive and create a "clone" of that drive, with all settings, programs and data intact. If this program has one serious limitation is that it cannot make a copy of a single partition on a hard drive and offer a way to restore it to a new hard drive. One must copy the entire disk, including all logical partitions.

It also lacks in proper support. Contacting the company is a chore, assuming that you can even get through to a person. But as long as the product works properly, you should not need the support.

If you do need to copy a single partition (especially the operating systme) go with GHOST. Otherwise, Acronis will work well for you at about 1/2 the price.

I bought this highly-rated product with great expectations. All I got was frustration. Upon installation, my windows 32 installation directory was "corrupted" and would not even come up in "safe mode". I tried a repair mode boot up, but the repair wanted a password for my windows administrator (me) and I had not passworded my windows--of course it didn't work without a password (Thanks Microsoft, for more trash there). I finally tried booting up using the "last good configuration" option. On the 5th try at this my system came back. Eager for more challenges from this software, I ran a repair installation of "true image" and got a program freeze when I tried to do a backup. I completely uninstalled the program and reinstalled it. Once again, a program freeze, right in the middle of a backup, this time it even froze the mouse. I uninstalled it and returned it to Amazon for a refund. I totaled about 6 hours of frustration and terror, thinking that I might have to reload windows and start over. Dantz Retrospect ran much better for me, seemed to be a more complete backup program, but is hard to learn to use.