A few upgrade questions.

Acronis have offered me a free upgrade from TI 10 to TI 11 as a way of saying sorry for the problems I have had with long restore times using the Acronis loader. They claim I should not suffer this issue with TI 11 - can anyone confirm this one way or the other?

My next question is this - is there any good reason to trade up from 10 to 11, which is the most reliable?

Finally, I have made a VistaPE disk - if I trade up will I have to make another VistaPE disk and purchase the TI 11 plugin for Winbuilder or will my present disk still work?

 

If your VistaPE disk works now, it will work no matter what version of True Image you subsequently put on the hard drive.

You only have to make a new VistaPE disk if you want to use ver 11 to do your Images and Restores.

I would take the free upgrade but before you install it, make a backup with your present VistaPE disk so you can always go back to how your system was before the install. And remember that the version after #11, ver 2009, is presently out on beta testing, so it shouldn't be long before ver. 11 is the "old" version.

But also read the forum to see the kinds of problems users are running into with ver 11.

 

Yes I do want to use my VistaPE disk as a means of restoring my HD as that is my main use for the VistaPE disk as recovery takes so long with Acronis Loader, so if I want to use it I will have to purchase new plugin and rebuild a new disk.

However, to be honest I am wondering if this free upgrade isn't something of a poison chalice as Internet forums seem to be full of people complaining about problems with TI 11. I'm wondering if there is any real need to upgrade at all from TI 10 as all my machines are Vista and TI 10 works flawlessly now I have a speedy recovery solution. Perhaps if I am going to upgrade I should skip TI 11 altogether as it doesn't seem to be Acronis's finest work and see if the 2009 edition fares any better? What do others think?

 

Well let me put it this way .... I'm still using the BartPE flavor of Version 9 and it works with my Dual Boot (Vista/XP) system as well.

 

Has anyone anything to add re: experience of using TI 11? I would have thought given all the posts concerning this particular release of TI that I would have been inundated with replies. One more question - if I do upgrade to TI 11 is it best to type in the "acpi=off noapic" command when making a boot disk just to be on the safe side?

 

I'd say definitely wait and then try 2009 and see if it does anything for you that you need and is worth the price. Since you've got things working with ATI10, just avoid the dreaded ATI11 and all its issues.

 

If your present setup backs up and restores without problems you aren't going to gain anything at all from upgrading. Much more likely you will have a load of issues to contend with that you don't have at present.

Having said that, I use v11.8101 without any problems at all, though the previous build 8053 needed VistaPE to restore. Remembering all the traumas I've had getting v11 to work properly I would unhesitatingly recommend you leave well alone

 

I would go ahead and take the free upgrade even if you don't use it now. You may use it later. I use TI 11 for a few things. One is because it doesn't scramble the partition table (causes problems with multi-booting) and the other is to exclude large files from a particular drive's image. Otherwise, I use TI 10 (4,942).

TI 11 generally does a better job of restoring Vista and having it bootable than TI 10 does. However, in most cases, there is a simple fix to get around that problem.

I would try the normal TI CD first. You may not need those parameters. Use a CD-RW if you don't want to risk wasting a CD-R.

 

I have installed TI 11 on my backup PC to test it out and oh my God I'm seriously underwhelmed by the product. First off it took a couple of installs before I had a working product (2). The backup progress bar doesn't work and neither does the percentage display so the user has no way of knowing how long the backup will take. Acronis support knowledge base state they are working on a fix - how long have they had to sort this out? Finally, I am in the middle of a recovery using my OneTouch 4 USB external HD as source. The recovery time states 3 hours for 60 gig and whilst this is better than the 17 hours with TI 10 it's nowhere near as good as the 38 minutes using the VistaPE disk.

Why can't Acronis get their products to work better than this? I shall reinstall TI 10 if this recovery completes OK and put this one down to experience.

Update - recovery finished in 3 hours as stated in Acronis Loader. However, I was biting my nails all the way through as this particular version just doesn't inspire confidence and seems pretty flaky. Despite all that however, the recovery did complete successfully. I will however been carrying on with TI10 not 11. I just can't believe this product is on sale to the general public.