Acronis True Image 11 Home - Not fit for consumption!

I recently purchased Acronis True Image 11 Home (build 8053). This product has so many bugs in it that it shouldn't even be available to the unsuspecting consumer. I have tested beta versions of products that have had less problems than TI11. Backup and Recovery is the core functionality of this product, yet their Backup Archives application will not even properly display backups that have been run. At other times, the Backup Archives screen will show multiple occurences of a single backup. It's like a slot machine ....... you get a different result every time you check the Backup Archives. I have reported this problem to Acronis, but haven't gotten a response back from their less than stellar technical support staff.

Acronis boasts about the value of the Secure Zone, but you can't even create the Secure Zone with their online application. It was only through this forum that I discovered that the Secure Zone could be created by rebooting with the Acronis CD. I have reported this problem to Acronis, but have not gotten a resolution.

Acronis has created this silly yellow banner to remind you that you haven't scheduled a backup. I have run multiple full image backups, both manually and thru their scheduler, but the yellow banner never goes away.

How can anyone develop and distribute software with such obvious problems? ................and expect to be paid for it!! There is just a total lack of quality assurance and product testing at Acronis, and apparently a total lack of respect for their customers. ACRONIS.........YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED AND EMBARRASSED FOR RELEASING THIS TO THE PUBLIC. It's not fit for consumption. You need to get your act together, or get out of the business!

I have worked in the IT field for over 25 years, and I'm used to working with professional people that can deliver a professional product. I have no confidence in this product, and will not be recommending it on a large scale for our agency.

I'm running Acronis TI11 on a Dell Precision M6300 laptop with 4 Gigs of ram, 200G hard drive, dual core extreme processor, running Windows XP Professional (SP2).

 

Hello harleymaninwpb,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please let us know your Acronis request number (e.g. [Acronis #123456]) which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? We will find out the reason for delay. If you have not received an autoreply then please send us a Private Message containing your e-mail address.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

I too am a new user of Acronis software, and have the same version of TI that you have.

Did my first restore yesterday and was disappointed on the limited program Help, and the results of the restore - I restored from a 40gb drive to a new 120gb drive, which when TI was done with it, somehow is being reported as a 208gb drive. I now have a very uncomfortable feeling about this new drive.

Please post back the results of the rest of your story, and your satisfaction with Acronis' support with this issue going forward.
I am still evaluating whether I will continue to use this software.
Thanks.

 

With respect to the Backup Archives displaying invalid data, I opened up Acronis #1338980 on Monday 2/18/08. Per Acronis's request, I uploaded the compressed Acronis report and System Info report. To this point, I haven't gotten a response back from Acronis. Backup and Recovery is the core feature of this product, yet it is not working correctly. How could this have been overlooked? I have a very vanilla setup.........Dell laptop with Windows XP professional. This product is of no value to me until this problem is resolved!!

On, Wednesday, 02/06/08, I opened up Acronis #1323924 because I couldn't create the Secure Zone with the online application. I discovered through this forum that others experienced the same problem, but were able to create the Secure Zone by rebooting their PC with the Acronis CD. Acronis's response was "We are glad to hear that you have successfully created Acronis Secure Zone." but offered no solution to the original problem. With respect to creating the Secure Zone, the application still does not work the way it is documented. The workaround that I discovered on this forum, was over a year old.

After I purchased Acronis True Image 11 Home, my password would not allow me to log into Acronis. I repeatedly sent requests to Acronis for a new password, but got no response. I finally opened a chat session with a support rep that got in contact with someone who change my password.........extemely aggravating. It shouldn't take over 24 hrs to get a password issued.

I realize that Acronis doesn't have the type of resources that you would find at Microsoft or Oracle, but I think you need to find a way to be more responsive to your customers.

 

FWIW I would not use Secure Zone. Just use a second drive to image to or make a partition.

 

FWIW I do use a secure zone on a second internal drive. Works like a charm. I currently use Version 10 tho' Version 11 was also able to support a secure zone.

Xpilot

 

I read your message with total disbelief!!!

I have been using TI 11 for a very long time, and I use it solidly to backup and restore my Vista and Linux partitions and HDD's. I also created the Secure Zone from Windows and use the Secure Zone, and it works flawlessly. You are talking nonsense when you say it doesn't allow creating a Secure Zone from Windows, because it does. In fact, your comments are bordering on outright lies and false information.

And by the way, the wipe program in TI 11 is also brilliant.

I have never ever had any problem. Acronis TI 11 is solid as a rock, very well written and has never let me down. It works without flaw for me and it's the best product I have ever bought.

And the times I have written to Acronis support asking questions, I have always received a very prompt reply, no longer than 48 hours. And the support people are very professional and very helpful.

I highly recommend TI 11 to anyone and everyone. Best buy ever. Keep up the great work Acronis.

And for the record harleymaninwpb, you claim to have been in the IT industry for 25 years. Well then you should know that there does NOT exist even one product on Earth that doesn't have some challenges on some peoples system. Can you name one single program or application that works perfectly on every single PC that it is installed on? Answer: NO! But that doesn't mean the product is rubbish as you claim. How can you expect Acronis to release a perfect product when you should know that is not possible, and no company in the world ever has been able to release a perfect product that works perfectly on all systems. MS Vista has more problems for more people than what Acronis TI has. Does that mean you claim that MS should not have released Vista either? For goodness sake harleymaninwpb, get a grip!

 

I am in between you guys on your appraisals of 11.
I don’t think it sucks but it seems to have a major bug restoring across a network. It locks up & restarts in windows. It seems to have a problem with the delay in information.
This is a very big bug. Is there a hotline for big bugs other than their support request??

 

ATI 11 has some critical bugs and a handful or so of noncritical bugs. If you ignore the noncritical bugs (like the yellow alert band misfunctioning or the oft times wonky progress indicators) and you use ATI11 in in the simplest way, say, just do full backups of hdisks with a single partiton -- the it will work on some hardware setups although not on all the ones that ATI10 worked on.

Otoh, it does work a few platforms that ATI10 has not yet supported. a person needs to test it on their own equipment and trying to suit their own purposes to see if it fits the bill. And testing means doing an actual restore. If you have Intel RAID, if you need to file-by-file backups, if you need to do scheduled backups of inc/diffs, then there's a good chance that ATI11 will not work for you.

It's not always a poor carpenter that praises a dull chisel. Sometimes a dull chisel is all that's needed. ATI 11 certainly doesn't live up to the description of its features on the Acronis web page. And the release that's been ought for several months has more probs than the first or second releases of ATI 8, 9, or 10.

But any individual can try it for free and see how it suits her or his purpose.

 

I've never used ATI 10 nor 11, but their enterprise versions are great. There still hasn't been any technical problems that their support hasn't provided us with a solution or walk-around.

 

Having read the original post I feel that I had to post to say that I have been using True Image for about 3 years now on both my previous XP machine and now my Vista machine. Granted, I only undertake backups once a week of my C: and D: drives onto an external USB hard drive but have never had any problems whatsoever. In fact, when I was using XP it saved me a number of times when my hard drives failed. Put in new hard drives, restored and everything worked as it did before. For me, it works flawlessly.

 

Tend to agree with Harleyman. I upgraded from TI10 to TI11 -- and was quickly forced to retreat back to TI10 again, because far too many things just didn't work properly. TI11 is clearly a bummer -- and what puzzles me is that Acronis have left it so long: no update since the second build, way back last November.

HOWEVER, I've been using TI9 and then TI10 for more than 2 years now, and find T10 works extremely well for my basic needs -- saving an image of any partition, and restoring it flawlessly when necessary.

So congratulations Acronis on the earlier versions; but no pleasure with the latest.

 

I must have missed something. I wasn't aware that version 11 had been out for a very long time.

 

Well, you know -- five months or so is a very long time when you're young

 

I beg to differ... The code written in a lot of OS's (Bios has its own but, we will stick to OS's) that stops PC's from loading due to some error affectionately referred to most people as the BSOD appears to work perfectly on ALL pc's & it apparently does not seem to discriminate from other platforms as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death

True...However the marketing propaganda these companies project would lead an inexperienced and/or naive person to believe it does.
I have been using TI for a few years also. I have ran into my own issues with the various builds 9-11. My latest one is on me XP64 bit comp & TI 11. Images would not mount and TI increased my boot time by 40 seconds (I accidentally discovered TI was the cause of the boot time when I completely uninstalled while corresponding with tech support) I just use the CD to do what I need at the moment cause the issues are not fixed yet for the re-installment of the program itself.
But here is an interesting tid bit I discovered when I did Motherboard bios update 1203 on my AMD Asus sli-deluxe. All Acronis recovery CD's were unusable. They would not fully load. I did take a manual pic of the error screen. Anyway, they worked with the 903 bios and the newer one 1302. I always thought that was rather weird.

 

and it has never worked for me on my MD8818, and Acronis failed to get it working too. The only way I can use it is as a plugin in a VistaPE disk, and then it works as it should.

But this should not have been necessary. Why do you think so many ppl come here seeking help if the program is so solid?

 

All this negative feedback has caused me to uninstall TI11 from my Vista computer, software I paid for and am sure I'll never receive a refund for. I've had no need to use it yet for restoration, but I don't want to have to worry about whether it will work. I don't think people should have to test their backup software. Maybe I'll reinstall it after the next update.

 

and yet all the negative feedback about vista hasn't led you to the same conclusion ?

 

I'm sorry but I can't believe anybody would put any software on their system and assumes it is working, particularly a backup program.

The last time you put a photo-editor on, did you see if it did indeed resize the photo? Did you make sure your new word-processor could print properly? For that matter did you see if the last OS upgrade you did found and setup all your devices? Did you go to a security test site and check your new firewall?

I've said it many times before, but where I worked, the computer operations people used to test new backup software, versions included, for days before putting it into service. They then ran the new system in parallel with the old for a while until they knew it was working. If you make backups with any program, why on earth would you assume that it is going to successfully restore all your data unless you've tried it out - in other words, tested it.

Once you do a test restore and find that the TI recovery environment works well with your hardware it will keep working well with your hardware until the HW breaks or you put in a different device that isn't supported by the Linux recovery environment.

If you don't want to do a test restore because you don't have a spare drive/don't want to run the risk of it not working and wiping your existing system the:

Create an archive, boot up the TI recovery CD. Validate your archive using the recovery CD since this is the environment that must run to do a restore of the active partition. Doing a validate in Windows is not sufficient since Windows isn't running when you restore the active partition. If you can validate OK then run through the restore wizard up to the last screen and cancel out instead of telling it to Proceed. This means that the recovery environment can find your archive, can read it properly and successfully reconstruct the 4000 checksums/GB and the wizard is able to do everything necessary up to actually restoring the data. Not as good as a full test restore but better than nothing.

 

I too have been forced to shelf ATI11 for the time being. I've had issues with using UNC's, scheduled backups not running, backups freezing midway thru.

From reading this forum, none of my problems appear to be unique, so I've been waiting for an update before I try again.

I check this forum every day as part of my morning routine to see if an update has been released.

I wish I owned 10 so I could downgrade to it

 

"long time" is relative and subjective to individuals.

For me "long time" is a few weeks. For another person "long time" is years.

It's all relative.

So for the record, TI 11 has been out for months now.

At least I think so Correct me if I am wrong.

 

LoL

 

This is exactly what I did, & have decided to do.

 

Since I'm a new Acronis user, I don't have that luxury to go back a version or two. Is there any way to get an earlier version if you are a registered T11 user?