Bad Information on ATI Web Site - No AES

Warning: The following link from the Acronis web site states that both ATI 11 Home and ATI 9.1 Workstation include "Password-based encryption (AES)". However, this is NOT the case. ATI technical support just confirmed this and I confirmed it by backing up a single file both with and without password protection. The resulting files had identical contents. Definitely no encryption offered with this product.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/comparison.html

It's even worse as the product caches passwords used to open volumes and has no easy way to clear the password. Key the correct password once and you are never prompted again. When I asked ATI support how to wipe clear the cache they simply ignored the question. The cleanup feature will take care of this but it's rather a pain to go through all that just to clear a PW.

There are many products that will perform backups well and ATI might be one of them. However, I backup to an external USB drive and want to be certain that if the drive is lost or stolen nobody can recover the data without the correct password. ATI does not offer this kind of security.

Still waiting to see if the ATI 30 day money back guarantee is real or if that is also just false marketing hype.

 

Hello bauh20,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We would like to inform you that Acronis True Image (all versions) do provide the archives password protection feature and it is counted as a reliable way to protect the data stored in a backup from an unauthorized access.

The backup files can have the identical size, but that is not the proof that they have exactly the same contents. One can compare the files for identical content by counting their checksums. You can calculate checksums for your archive files (protected with a password and not) by using a free checksum utility.

In the attachment you can find the screen shots representing the results of a test similar to yours performed by me.

Please feel free to contact us again any time should you have any further questions.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Alexey Bogomolov

 

bauh20 I believe is concerned that the entire archive is not encrypted as one might think reading the Acronis description. The password may or may not be adequate in rendering the archive secure but I'll leave that discussion to the security experts.

I don't think the checksum test proves much of anything since just adding the password characters to the archive, even if they didn't do anything at all, would change the checksum. Granted, it does show you can have a file of the same size whose contents differ but that's about it.

 

seekforever is correct, my concern is that the archive file is not encrypted. In fact, the Advanced Encryption Algorithm (AES) is not utilized in the product at all and yet the Acronis web site makes the claim that AIT 11 uses AES encryption.

I have asked for a refund twice now under the Acronis "money back guarantee". The first time they replied suggesting I wait for the next version because AES might be included. The second time they replied with an offer to switch to Disk Director. At this point the "money back guarantee" has not been honored by Acronis.

Does anyone know of any way to escalate this to Acronis management? I'd really like to get my money back.

 

Hello bauh20,

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

You can write an answer and inform Support Team that you do not need Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 and they should proceed with refund.

Thank you.

--
Michael Levchenko

 

Just received an e-mail confirming that a refund is on the way. Someone from marketing also wrote to tell me they are correcting features list on the web site.