If you can't deliver, how about a refund, Acronis?

I bought the upgrade to TI11 from TI10 soon after 11 was released. I found myself with a largely useless piece of software in which (1) The scheduling which I relied on just didn't work. Nada. Nothing happened. (2) Editing a task crashed the program. Couldn't edit -- only re-create. (3) When restoring, I got frequent "freezes" which generally turned out not to be permanent, but could last anything up to an hour. Also some serious data corruption.

Anyone in their right mind would have thrown the book at Acronis straight away. But I was crazy. I thought, these guys will iron out the bugs pretty soon. They must be a professional bunch. Let's not be too hasty.

That was more than 8 months ago. And all we've heard from Acronis since then has been a still-useless update 6 months ago which fixed none of the problems. After that, silence.

Hasty I wasn't. Tolerant far beyond the call of duty I was.

Tell us NOW please WHEN exactly you are going to give us the software we paid good money for. Otherwise, give us our good money back!

 

I have recently bought T11 and I have experienced the exact same problems, namely:

1) Scheduling not functioning. Nothing in the logs. I've resorted to using the windows task scheduler, but still having problems waking up the Vista machine.
2) Editing a task crashes the program. Can only recreate. I've resorted to editing the source .xml file.
3) When doing the initial testing of restore, I thought the program had crashed, as when I click on next after selecting the disk, the program "froze". It wasn't until I left it for half an hour that it came back. It appears to be doing some sort of check, which is exacerbated by restoring over the network. Even on the Vista machine, there is a freeze of about a minute.

Not good news that these problems have been around for this length of time and not being fixed...

Cheers,

Stewart

 

Is anyone at Acronis listening?

 

From an academic point of view, it would be interesting to know, whether those who have scheduling problems have a particular versions of MS software, or even have the same 3rd part software installed.

This must be caused by something on those systems such as manufacturer utilities or similar, because there are those like myself who don't have this problem.

Out of interest, is this problem with schedules that have been 'imported' from v10 or brand new schedules?

Crashing caused by editing, can be caused by a corruption in the XML tis file or if the MBR or MFT has been changed, for example adding or deleting a partition will cause a failure in a task.

If this is so, then I suspect it'll take Acronis some time to hunt the problem down.

Colin

 

Interesting comment, Colin. Thanks. I can only say that this week I had the opportunity to do a completely fresh OS install on newly formatted drives on two relatively new Dell notebooks -- a Precision M6300 and an Inspiron 9400 -- both running XP SP2.

In each case, as an experiment, I made TI11 the first piece of software to be installed (after the drivers and Dell system s/w); and in each case the same problems were evident -- can't schedule; can't edit schedules; and restore (using the Acronis-created Linux disk) was unpredictable. One attempted restore out of 3 on one of the machines failed completely -- just hung. (I didn't have the time or patience to try any restores on the other machine.) My schedules were brand-new schedules, specially created.

So unless there's something in the Dell architecture, or in their system software, that's causing the problems, it seems unlikely to be 3rd party s/w? I seem to remember that the TI11 probs are not confined to Dell machines in any case.

It does appear that restores using a VistaPE boot disk may indeed work OK -- I am still in the process of testing this. But it's completely ridiculous that we should have to resort to 3rd-party fixes to make such a fundamental function of Acronis work.

Do you have absolutely NO problems at all with TI11 -- i.e. every function works for you exactly as it should? What machine & OS are you using?

dom

 

I do have some problems with TI 11, though none are in the 'showstopping' category.

I can't explore on one of my installation, even with the registry fix, however, I only mount my images so this isn't a problem. Like many others I also have the dodgy image time indicator along with, an occasional task corruption.

With Echo I sometimes have problems with ImageAgent not connecting.

I am aware that some of these problems have existed from very early builds of TI and Echo, however I have one install of these programs on my XP test partition (a complete XP install, with only a firewall and whatever program I'm testing installed) and they work perfectly. This being on the same machine - so I know my problems must be down to other utilities and registry entries that I have installed.

My machine is a Heinz 57, it is true that the problems are not related to only Dell machines, but Dell machines do seem to present a number of problems, especially when mixed with Vista.

Dell like Acer, tend to preload their machines with special utilities, such as disk and file security, background OEM updaters, background file imaging utilities etc, these tend to have the ability to interfere with programs that are similar to themselves. The only hardware problems I have had with HP (laptops) is the ACPI manager has in the past caused TI 8 to not be able to recognise USB drives after hibernation or standby.

Colin

 

Theres only one time I had a scheduling problem. and I troubleshoot it to zone alarm firewall. When I upgraded to the latest version of zone alarm problem went away. I suspect scheduling problems are related to other programs (antivirus/antispyware/firewall etc) interfering with true image.

 

I was offered a free Acronis product as compensation for my continous trouble. This was an acceptable proposal.
Volkmar

 

While I don't schedule TI, I have found scheduling to be a bit of a crap shoot at times with other programs so I would tend to agree that it could be other apps.

 

Whatever it is, in my case it wasn't any other applications -- since TI11 demonstrated all its main faults on 2 machines with clean O/S installs in each case & before any other apps (apart from system apps) had been loaded.

I'd tend to suspect the vagaries of individual machines (architecture, system software) as being more probable causes -- both my machines were fairly recent Dell laptops.

Makes yoiu wonder how anyone else manages to produce viable software. Amazingly enough, they often do.

dom

 

I have a Dell XPS M1530 and a Dell Inspiron 1525 both new (bought within the last 3 months) and both have had some difficulties with Acronis. I had such trouble they offered me several new Acronis Products (Migrate Easy and Echo Workstation) neither of which the Dell's were able to run successfully (I really wanted Echo Workstation too - it sounded so fun!)

I also have an Acer Notebook and an HP Pavillion Desktop and both of those have ZERO problems with Acronis.

If Dell and Acronis made nice it would sure make my life eaiser... hopefully they will eventually. When they do I want to get Echo Workstation.

Sandy

 

At work I have an Acer computer, which is running TI 9.1 quite happily, however, for those that have scheduling problems with Dell's, a thought has come to me. Recently I suddenly lost the ability to access any USB hard drive or flash drive attached - bang goes TI.

The drive(s) would get a drive letter allocated, but nothing would allow the contents of the drive to be accessed.

I finally tracked the problem down to an Acer utility (that must have updated it's little self) called eLock, disabled the service and removed it from MSCONFIG startup file and, lo and behold access to my USB drives became available again.

I believe other manufacturers also use this utility on their systems, might be worth checking if Dell use it, and if so, when disabled does TI behave itself?

Colin