For an 11th generation product, why are there still so many problems??

I dont get it. Ove 20,000 posts to date on this forum and if one scans the topics, the vast majority appears to related to problems ( ie images that either dont get created to dont get restored) ; the minority of posts relate to questions, comments and suggestions.

For an 11th generation product, why are there still so many problems?? And with so many problems, why is there such a following?

Is it that the competetive products are even worse?...or is it that this is what forums are all about - that is, all we tend to see posted, are the problems...

 

I've always thought Ghost was the better product, but a guy I know and respect recommends Acronis.

All products have problems.

 

I think it is more like 7th generation. I think they skipped versions 2-5 in order to align with a competitor in V6.

I can't comment personally on the other products, I haven't used ghost for many years for example. However many of the problems are due to the fact that the Linux drivers tend to lag the Windows ones by a number of months (not directly Acronis' fault). This can cause difficulties when restoring from CD, as the backup part (when done under Windows) works OK, but the restore (from CD for system partitions) may not be able to access the same hardware. Note that this issue is usually only a problem for very new hardware.

I have noticed frustrated TI users leaving the forum in the past, promising never to to touch Acronis again. After checking out the competitors' products they usually appear back in the forum.

F.

 

I agree with Foghorne's points.

What I find troublesome is the introduction of features that don't work and by this I mean don't work at all not just on some peculiar set of hardware and OS setup. I suspect the staff is stretched pretty thin and the time spent on testing and QA is minimal. Like most companies sales is a major issue and they are probably driven more by the marketing people than the engineering people.

Having said the above, developing a product that is to run flawlessly on the millions of permutations of combinations of hardware and software that represents the PC world is no trivial task.

Another point is that in doing a backup and restore you are dealing with a lot of data be read and written as fast as the machine will go. For a 10GB backup that is 80,000,000,000 bits of data read and as many again written and it must be done with every bit perfect or the dreaded "corrupt archive" message will popup. If any of the hardware involved in the process is marginal this is likely to be the time it will show up. Usually, when it does, since TI was running it gets the blame as being the cause.

 

I bought this pice of crap 3 month ago. Since now there is no update in german and the product is not working. So much money for an alpha version of a product is faulting customers. Gone back to Ghost two month ago and on vista all is running very very well.

 

I'm not for a minute suggesting that True Image is problem-free, but my sense is that a pretty large percentage of the problems here are actually PC tech literacy problems - and that's something that bedevils the whole industry and not just Acronis or Microsoft or whatever.

Furthermore, unlike most applications people install on their PCs, True Image does some pretty low-level stuff in the way it exercises memory and utilises storage controllers and disk.

As an example, just look at the issues people have understanding disk cloning vs partition imaging to a TIB file. I know quite a few ATI users who only want to backup but have never made a TIB image - they always clone their drive. Half have only the scantest knowledge of PCS, and the other half think they know quite a bit but a goodly portion of what they know is wrong. Neither has ever bothered to read the manual or the included Help file.

Now when you're dealing in an irreglar way (which is necessary for True Image) with basic things like disks, file systems, partitions, and storage controllers, this is a recipe for problems ... and I'm not sure how Acronis can fix that, because their product by nature is not a regular application but a system tool.

There's another great challenge Acronis has that doesn't face regular application vendors: they have to include a bootable operating system in their product, and that has to be constantly updated and adapted to support new hardware. Example: Earlier this year I bought some P35 motherboards, and of course this chipset wasn't supported in the then current versions of the corporate products. You could do quite a bit of stuff, but not everything worked, and it's not Acronis's fault.

Then there are the difficulties related to the various storage attachment schemas and their associated drivers and subsystems, and the large variety of configurations the PC world permits. This is an immense challenge, and personally think Acronis do an astonishingly good job of supporting this area.

Acronis, in my view, have given a lot of attention to both the underlying architecture and technologies, and also to the UI. In my view it's best of breed in partition imaging tools. Just look at other products, and you'll soon see why - despite the difficulties, challenges, and yes, the problems - there really isn't aything else out there that comes close to either ATI's performance & power or ease its of use.

 

I have a P5B-Deluxe Mainboard, which is out over a year. The ICH8R chipset is not supported in a raid config by ATI 11. If this is not poor then what.
I have running Windows Vista, so Bart-PE is a problem. What to do now ?
Switching to another company.

 

Why is that?

 

It's not a problem at all. We now have WinBuilder to make VistaPE that is much easier than BartPE. See the Guide on my website.

A BartPE disk will boot and run on a Vista machine with no problem. The only issue is that you need a WinXP SP2 source to build the disk on a Vista machine. If you had the source to build a BartPE on an XP machine, you can use the same source to build BartPE on a Vista machine.

 

If you've built bart CDs before, then building a VistaPE disk with winbuilder will be a breeze.