Acronis rant

[DBissett]

I cannot get Acronis True Image to do a differential backup. It either does not post an error message, only saying "backup failed", or says that "no command was executed because no command was set by default". This is after I go through the entire wizard telling it to do a differential backup. Their forums are full of customers having a wide variety of problems with the software, with either backups failing or restores not restoring, and there is very little help offered either in the software itself or by tech support. I emailed them with my problem 2 days ago and have heard nothing. It appears to be a "full featured" and user friendly problem but it's not the latter. It is buggy and even though you might have a whole library of backups I doubt it would restore data to a usable condition after a fatal crash. It is hard to believe that so many reviews place this at the top of the list. That can only mean that the list of products that do full image backups is very short and the rest of the products are complete garbage. This is an area begging for someone to come along and produce a product that really works and then back it up with some decent customer service. Apparently it's not out there now.

 

[13Gigatons]

What OS ?

What version Acronis?

Did you make a full backup first?

 

[George P Burdell]

Need more info.

 

[Stangs55]

If you're backing up to a networked drive, make sure that you're using the full network path instead of a mapped driver letter.

 

[akhilles]

That's why I LOVE version 10. 11 is buggy, according to some of the customers on their forum, some other forums and even on some e-tailers like amazon. Read them. I couldn't restore a manually backed up windows OS partition in 11. But I can in 10 or even 9. In 10 I schedule a task to back up the whole C drive to D in early morning. It works in XP & Vista. Just have to make sure I re-enter the account password after I change it. And yes, I have restored the backup to C a few times flawlessly. The best thing about TI is that the whole archive is a clickable virtual drive that can be selectively restored using copy & paste in my computer.

Stick with v10.

 

[SpanishFry]

Originally posted by: akhilles
That's why I LOVE version 10. 11 is buggy, according to some of the customers on their forum, some other forums and even on some e-tailers like amazon. Read them. I couldn't restore a manually backed up windows OS partition in 11. But I can in 10 or even 9. In 10 I schedule a task to back up the whole C drive to D in early morning. It works in XP & Vista. Just have to make sure I re-enter the account password after I change it. And yes, I have restored the backup to C a few times flawlessly. The best thing about TI is that the whole archive is a clickable virtual drive that can be selectively restored using copy & paste in my computer.

Stick with v10.

Agree.

I was using 10 and "upgraded" to v11. I ended up with an unusable archive because of some partition error. Thankfully I had used VMware to create a full backup of my machine as well.

 

[jjsbasmt]

I'm gald to have seen this topic. I have used ver 9 and now 10 and haven't had any issues. I now have doubts whether I should pluck down for ver 11. I also use Ghost 12, but not on the same systems I use Acronis. Ghost works fine for me too, but I like the ease of use with TI.

 

[DBissett]

I got the original problem solved, and it was due to my own ignorance and somewhat inadaquate instructions in the TI manual......my original backup was a computer image, and my followup differential backup was a "data" backup, which was failing because the backup type didn't match the original backup. IT worked fine after settting the bu type to "computer" to match the original. While there is a wealth of definitions/info in the help manual, nowhere does it explain that if you start with a "computer" backup, any followup bu's need to be this type also. OTOH, if your original bu is a full "data" backup, the followups need to be set the "data" type of backup. Very confusing. Anyway, it appears that some users have benefitted from this discussion and that's a good thing. From what I've read here I will also stay away from ver 11. I was tempted to upgrade because I understand that you cannot do partial restores only from version 11 and nothing earlier. Versions 10 and earlier require that you do a complete restore.

 

[George P Burdell]

I restored my Vista x64 computer to a two-week-old backup a while ago using Acronis 11. Worked fine.

 

[13Gigatons]

I use 11.0 build 8027 and have had no issues with it.

As far as the complaints on the forum I think most of those are from people who don't know what they are doing. Just like DBissett here in this thread admits he made the mistake.

The My Computer is a bit vague and should be more like My Computer (partitions and whole drives)

Also True Image is MUCH better at backing up partitions or whole drives. The inclusion of DATA, SETTINGS and EMAIL is feature creep.

 

[QueBert]

I HATE Acronis, I tried 2 version 9 & 10 on my GF's box, if I do the incremental backup it ends up creating tons of files even though she almost never installs anything and hardly changes any files. 500 gigs HD about 70% full on a 500 gig external HD for backup will be full after 4 backups. This program is retarded I have no idea what the hell it's backing up new every time it runs.

 

[mc866]

I've been using Acronis since version 7 and the only issue I had with 11 was the scheduled tasks not running when they are supposed to. Acronis posted an updated task scheduler and everything seems to be working fine.

 

[13Gigatons]

Originally posted by: QueBert
I HATE Acronis, I tried 2 version 9 & 10 on my GF's box, if I do the incremental backup it ends up creating tons of files even though she almost never installs anything and hardly changes any files. 500 gigs HD about 70% full on a 500 gig external HD for backup will be full after 4 backups. This program is retarded I have no idea what the hell it's backing up new every time it runs.

It works at the sector level not the file level. Slight changes to sectors will cause them to be backed up.

I make incremental everyday but then make new FULL backups once a week.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: 13Gigatons

Originally posted by: QueBert
I HATE Acronis, I tried 2 version 9 & 10 on my GF's box, if I do the incremental backup it ends up creating tons of files even though she almost never installs anything and hardly changes any files. 500 gigs HD about 70% full on a 500 gig external HD for backup will be full after 4 backups. This program is retarded I have no idea what the hell it's backing up new every time it runs.

It works at the sector level not the file level. Slight changes to sectors will cause them to be backed up.

I make incremental everyday but then make new FULL backups once a week.

well the way they implemented it is retarded, the way it fills up a 500 gig drive in a few extra incremental backups she would need unlimited HD space to keep it flowing. Why can't it just make 1 backup then modify any changed files in that one backup instead of creating bunches of extra files that take up extra space, seems lame to me. There has to be a better solution.

 

[13Gigatons]

Originally posted by: QueBert

Originally posted by: 13Gigatons

Originally posted by: QueBert
I HATE Acronis, I tried 2 version 9 & 10 on my GF's box, if I do the incremental backup it ends up creating tons of files even though she almost never installs anything and hardly changes any files. 500 gigs HD about 70% full on a 500 gig external HD for backup will be full after 4 backups. This program is retarded I have no idea what the hell it's backing up new every time it runs.

It works at the sector level not the file level. Slight changes to sectors will cause them to be backed up.

I make incremental everyday but then make new FULL backups once a week.

well the way they implemented it is retarded, the way it fills up a 500 gig drive in a few extra incremental backups she would need unlimited HD space to keep it flowing. Why can't it just make 1 backup then modify any changed files in that one backup instead of creating bunches of extra files that take up extra space, seems lame to me. There has to be a better solution.

Well first you should probably have partitions like this:

1. C 80gb ( Vista )

2. D 40gb ( Server 2008 )

3. L 80gb ( Downloads )

4. M 200gb ( Media )

5. S 100gb ( Acronis )

I use Acronis to backup the C drive to S drive. The 80 gb C drive compresses to 22gb which easily fits into the 100gb space on the s drive.

The M drive which contains 200gb of mp3's and videos is backed up to dvd's or another hard drive.

The L drive mainly contains downloads so I don't really bother trying to back that up since most of it becomes outdated over time.

This setup saves time and space. Restoring a 80gb partition is much faster then restoring an entire 500gb hard drive.

 

[QueBert]

I've never had a partition go bad but I have had HD's go bad, I'll just set it to do a full backup every time, it's not a big deal I guess it does run at 2AM so it's not like the PC is in use anyways.

 

[mooseracing]

Yes Acronis Support sucks...Check out Wilder Security Forums, they are the official support forums for Acronis and alot of people are willing to help on there. I've had horrible luck trying to implement them in a business enviroment.