Do what? Anyway, here is what I did. First, from when I first installed Win 8.1 and activated it, I made TI 2015 backups...FULL...with the rescue media. Then I have been making full backups as I installed "stuff" Like Office 2013, etc. ALL were FULL. All in all I have 18 full backups. Here is why I did all of this testing. All of my system is working well except for 1 thing. My dvd writer will not write well. It can freeze the system 70% of the time and I have to power down to restart. I finally decided to see if there was something I installed that was causing this. This is a new ASUS SATA writer and it will read anything and even write well. But, it only wrote well if I had it on a SATA to USB cable. So I knew the drive was OK. Anyway, to make a long story even longer, I restored to my first backup. I did NOT clear the SSD and to my surprise the original restored image still had my DVD issue! I thought that it must have NEVER worked, but now I knew I could restore an image. So I created 1 last image and even created a second one with Macrium free and then reinstalled win 8.1. WOW, that fixed my DVD writer issue(s). However I noticed when I reinstalled Win 8.1 it did not format GPT, so I started over. I did look at my Device Manager and saw that the "bad" dvd issue had an Intel 9 series controller showing it the IDE ATA section and the good NEW install just had Standard SATA AHCI. So, I did a DISKPART and saw that yes I had 2 partitions and did a clean. The drive then had no partitions left. I guess this is more than you wanted to know. OH, one time I used it when I did not clean it and it did restore all 4. Anyway, I fixed my current system image by changing the driver. Something I tried by telling device manager to look for a driver and said it was already on my system. Sure enough it found 2 and I selected the STD instead of the Intel. Time to fix, 1 minute...time to see what the heck was going on...a week! I know this is more than you asked...sorry.
Yes, CLEAN means it. There are NO partitions left. That Utility is not very obvious but as long as you list disk and then select disk 0 there are no problems.
Acronis True Image 2015 - 1 PC (DVD Case) $20.00 with Free shipping Promo code : EMCAPNR58 Expires 3/30/15 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832200074
Since moving to Reflect from ATI I also noticed the slightly bigger backup files and slightly longer times. But I also noticed Reflect only uses one core for backing up while ATI uses all four cores. Anyone else see this and is this normal for Reflect?
I find Oliver's speed comparisons very interesting, but I can't help but wonder if they would hold up for hot backups. Sounds like the making of a new testing exercise for Brian K.
appster, Sorry but imaging time isn't one of my interests. My backups occur in the background without a Command Window or a GUI so it's not important to me whether it takes one minute or one hour. Restore time is of interest because you are usually waiting for it to finish. My Win8.1 restore times are around two minutes. 75 seconds on fresh test Win8.1 systems. Restore time is mainly dependent on the data size of the OS partition rather than the choice of image application. I'm excluding Macrium's Rapid Delta feature from this statement because most of my test restores are to blank HDs.
Can Acronis now be installed without all it's wizbang hidden stuff. Also is uninstall clean. Used to be a driver would be nasty to uninstall
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In version 2015 Acronis removed a whole lot of features: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/65498 Of course the company got a lot of flak for this (probably from the same people who previously complained that True Image was bloated). But fact is the the GUI is now very clean and easy to use, at least for new users of the software. So what kind of "whiz-bang hidden stuff" are you possibly talking about? There still is the "Secure Zone" and the "Startup Recovery Manager". If you do not like them, just do not use them. A lot of other image backuppers also offer the option to fire up the recovery console before Windows boots. Then there is the integrated cloud backup with its cloud synchronization module, and there is the "Non-Stop Backup". Just do not use these features and deactivate the two corresponding services. So I have to conclude that Acronis 2015 does not have too much "whiz-bang hidden stuff" compared to other image backup software. Uninstalling the software also has been improved considerably. And in any case there is still the Acronis Cleanup Tool which so far has always been able to remove most of Acronis' traces from my computer. Cheers manolito
Hi manolito Yep it was "Secure Zone and the Startup thingie. Is the startup recover manager Acronis or does it just use boot manager. And for both of these it's not a matter of not using them, but can you chose not to install them. Several other imaging programs offer the option to put preboot in the windows boot manager. But it is an option that the user has to choose
It is not really different with Acronis. The Startup Recovery Manager is not installed by default, you have to activate it manually. I find it only useful under WinXP, under current Windows versions you can just as well integrate the Linux boot ISO into the BCD store (using EasyBCD). And all the Secure Zone script does is create a new partition on your HDD which is somehow "protected" by Acronis (it is not hidden BTW). I do not find it useful since I believe that image backups should be stored on separate physical HDDs. But in any case these two features do not qualify as "whiz-bang hidden stuff" because nothing gets installed during the normal software installation. Cheers manolito
Of course, the Secure Zone will not be installed during the True Image installation. If you want the Secure Zone you have to activate it manually after the True Image installation.
Secure Zone installation is not optional, activation however is still optional like it has been the case with true image 2014/2013/2012. in my opinion the 'hidden stuff' has become worse as at least in 2014 you could choose upon install or after install not to enable deep windows integration like THIS. there is no choice at all for 2015
