I tried Acronis and it let me down

I wanted to post my experience with Acronis True Image this past week. I downloaded the trial, cloned my Windows XP Pro "C" drive to an external USB HD. I verified the image and it verified just fine. 2 days ago my "C" drive wouldn't boot. I wasn't too upset becuase I had just cloned my drive, so I thought.
I reinstalled Windows XP, installed Acronis, and attempted to clone the image I had backed up, back onto the "C" drive. I must have tried 1/2 dozen times getting the same error. I don't have the "exact" error message but it would say it neeeded to reboot in order to finish the copying of the image, however, Windows XP would reboot with a message that it "completed with errors", less than 2 min later, and after it booted up nothing had been done. I searched for the error message in this forum and found out that others had this same problem. I tried some of the solutions that Acronis customer service had posted with no success. The only thing I was able to do was restore my documents folder and a few other folders. With so many people having this same error, you would think they (Acronis) would fix this problem. I am going to give Norton Ghost a try now.

 

Why didn't you just make a Full Back-up of your C: Drive, and save it to your External?? You could've used the "Boot-CD"...along with the .TIB file... to Restore the HD.

When the term... "Clone" a HD is used, I think of cloning from one Internal HD to another Internal HD. I did this, and it works great. Actually, I've been using the "Cloned" (destination) HD for 2 days now. Have not noticed any problems at all. I've tested everything. Not ONE problem at all. The "Cloned" procedure worked to absolute perfection on my system!

 

You have your terminology slightly mixed up. I presume that you created an image onto your external drive and it verified OK.

Why did you reinstall XP? All you needed to do was restore the image from your external drive to your original disk. That is the beauty of imaging in that you do not need to reinstall your OS and all the programs that you had on with it prior to the problem occurring.

Did you retrieve them from the image or were they in a separate folder on your external HD?

If there are many people experiencing this same error, then presumably you have seen this error recorded by others in this forum. If that is the case, just copy it and report it yourself. Then someone on this forum might be able to help you out.

It's an alternative product, but like any other product, it has it's own problems as experienced by some users and as attested in the following forum.

http://radified.com/cgi-bin/YaBB/YaBB.cgi?board=general

 

Here is the balance story... I image every week on a friday to a USB 2.0 HDD tonight because I stuffed up by trying to update a program I had to restore Fridays image using the boot CD.....

Worked perfectly without error the whole 85 meg done in about 38 minutes.

 

Exactly. There is no need to reinstall anything. And if you used the "clone" feature you must realize that this is not the same as "imaging" one drive partition to another.

 

Did you try to restore the image from within Windows or did you use the Recovery disk? If you tried to recover from within Windows then I suggest giving the Recovery disk a try. Although the option from within Windows is available, most posters on this forum suggest to restore the image using the Recovery disk. You migh find that it works.

 

And another one. I had a partially crippled HP box running XP. I knew that a brand new installation had just been done on identical hardware at our head office 250 miles away. I Remote Desktop'd into it, installed ATI 9 Home, and made an image of the remote box. I then FTP'd the image back to my local machine and restored it. Worked a treat

F

 

This comment is for all the "newbies" out there who are with some trepidation trying to decide whether or not to use Acronis True Image and who may be negatively influenced by postings such as this.

Acronis True Image is a bit like a car - it is only as good as the person who is driving it. Think about that.

If you are new to ATI and do not want to read the User Guide (all 81 pages of it); and do not want to prepare your environment by running utilities like Disk Cleanup, Check Disk and Defrag; and don't want to bother with testing your solution before disaster strikes......... then perhaps you should just stay with Windows Backup.

There is no "free lunch". To get results you must be prepared to invest time and effort.

So in reply to the plaintive cry of "artmoe" who started this thread that "I tried Acronis and it let me down..." I suggest that possibly "artmoe", you didn't try hard enough and that maybe you let yourself down.

 

Okay, i want to interject this as well: It is very easy to use the program.

You do not have to read 81 pages of anything. You DO have to understand what you are doing - the fundamentals, and you DO have to invest time in understanding just that. Ask questions here at the forum, but take time to learn just enough to ask the right question.

Tabvla is right. There is no such thing ask a free lunch. Using this product means educating yourself a little bit. But believe me, Acronis True Image requires no advanced knowledge of anything. I'm not sure most new users understand the fundamental difference between "cloning" and "imaging". This is imperative to understand if you want success with this product, yet it seems many use these words interchangeably, when in fact, they are not.

For the new users: This product's biggest success lies in it's ability to image one hard drive partition to another. The image is a "backup", ready to be re-imaged to the partition that was once healthy but somehow went problematic. This feature alone is worth the cost of the product, and it is a very straightforward procedure to both "create" the image and to "restore" the image. Take to the time to understand and test this before doing anything that might be an ounce more complex.

 

I agree I am a newbie when it comes to cloning, restoring, etc. As you mentioned I probably did let myself down and not Acronis letting me down. I mistakenly assumed that you could copy an image of the boot drive to a external drive and simply copy back that image to a newly installed Windows XP in case the orignal drive wouldn't boot up anymore. And perhaps you can, I just didn't take the proper steps to accomplish that. I didn't realize you didn't have to reinstall Windows XP in order to do a restore. Perhaps that's what my problem was. I was trying to do the restore from within Windows XP from the external hd.
This predicament got me thinking and made me want to further explore this dilemma so that in case I needed to restore my drive in the future, I would know exactly how to do it. So I went out and bought a new 200 gig internal hd. I then installed the new hd as a slave and used Acronis to "clone" my boot (C) drive to the new hd. I noticed a screen come up that never came up on my earlier tries and showed a progress bar of the cloning process. After it finished and I shut off the computer, I changed the jumper of the 200 gig hd and set it as the master and attempted to boot up from it. A message popped up stating that Acronis was finishing the installation and then rebooted itself and Windows XP started up just like the original drive. I was very amazed that everything was exactly as it was on the original drive and of course satisfied that I was able to prove to myself that Acronis is indeed and very good program. My initial presumption that Acronis was buggy was of course premature.
Also I don't think you need to read all 81 pages in order to learn how to use this program. BTW, this was not a disaster since I was able to retrieve the important files I needed. As it turns out, it turned out being just like you posted, a test of my solution before disaster really strikes. Now I know I don't have to worry of a failing HD. Thanks.

 

A significant problem is that folkes try using features such as Secure Zone and Cloning with understanding what it means.

Even Acronis has recommended that folkes not use Secure zone, except in certain circumstances. Secure zone should be avoided at all costs, however, the term "Secure Zone" itself entraps folkes, not to mention its easily accessed via the GUI.

Ditto for "cloning". Just do imaging and restoring, and, where needed, format the drives before/after restoration witha program such as Partition Magic (I've not tried Disk Director, but some folkes like it).

 

In my very humble and perhaps cynical opinion, the only reason Secure Zone exists was so that Acronis did not exclude the huge number of single drive/single partition users from their business model. Good from a marketing point of view perhaps, but I think it is a bad call. It might fool some into thinking their data is safe. I think it is in the interests of their product sales, for Acronis to help safeguard peoples data. Step 1 here should surely be - to recommend that users never backup to the same hard drive - even if it is to another partition with the word "Secure" in its name.

F

 

I am at a loss to understand the secure zone knockers who seem to take every opportunity to scare users from using it. It is a facility or tool that can be used to great effect, yes even on a single drive, to store usable images of ones main or only hard drive. It is much more secure from outside interference than just using a file or folder to store backups. It does not take much thought by any user to realise that images stored on the same drive that they are protecting will not protect against total drive failure.
If set up on an internal slave drive the secure zone really comes into its own. It manages backups on the FIFO basis. Backups can be set up by a simple schedule to run as often as required. Best of all the backups happen in the background and do not need any user intervention, indeed the user does not even need to be present at all while the backups are running.

 

Hi Xpilot,

That's a little emotional. Secure Zone has its place, it's just that it is more of a toy than a serious backup repository imv.

I agree it simplifies the FIFOing, but to be honest you don't need a secure zone to do any of this. Scheduled backups alone can provide this, and this can be further simplified by using them in conjuction with batch files. I don't see the benefit in having simplified FIFO management at the expense of keeping your backups on the same disk drive as the source data. I think users need to consider what their priorities are.


F

 

I think this thread has wandered rather far from the original post.

In the interests of thread clarity, it may be helpful if a separate thread was started dealing specifically with the subject of the Secure Zone.

I for one would like to discuss the SZ in more detail but don't think that it belongs in this thread.

 

I obviously did not put my main point clearly enough. By far the best way to use the secure zone is to set it up on a second internal slave drive. It has never been my practice to have backups on the same disk as the source data. If you re-read what I actually wrote you may see that is what I was saying.
As to it being a toy what do you mean by that ? I find it a very useful tool and it runs perfectly every day without fail.
I agree that scheduling can be done by other means and be supplimented by batch files but I would hardly see that as a simplification. My backup schedule is prepared in the Acronis wizard and is a one liner. Difficult to make it more simple than that.

Xpilot

 

Sorry, wasn't trying to suggest that you were using SZ on a single drive, just that it would be folly for anyone to do so who cared about their data.

I agree that there are benefits in obfuscation and FIFO management in using a SZ - assuming it is on a separate drive to the data.

F