Is Acronis True Image 9 safe to use now, or is it still buggy like before?

Is Acronis True Image 9 safe to use now, or is it buggy like it was in the begining when version 9 came out. Should I stick to version 8. When I upgraded to 9, just when it came out it was so much bugs in it, and other that complaint abot the same things. Nothing was working right, so I just uninstalled the version 9, and put the old stabel version 8 back on. I dont wish to install the version 9 just to try if it works well. So I just ask you here at the forum first.

 

It works for me. It's a lot better than when first introduced due to a lot of hard work to correct the items identified as deficient.

 

Build 2337 seems to be stable....a couple of small bugs is left, but these them to be mostly cosmetic.


Greetings

Volker

 

Hello Downey,

This previous thread titled <TI 9.0 Build 2337 - What Works and What Doen't> should help you to draw your own conclusion.

Regards

 

I own both but stick with TI8 v937. TI9 just isn't where it needs to be yet:
- still slow USB driver problems for recent hardware
- unreliable cloning
- persistent inability to image certain manufacturer's hidden partitions
- cryptic error messages
- archive corruption/error messages
- unreliable boot CD functions
- no BartPE plugin, etc.

 

Also, I'm curious as I've read many a post as to how slow v.9 is in it's actions, but really not much comment as to how it compares to the latest v.8.0.937 regarding the overall speed in making, or restoring an image.

I for one, find the latest v.8 very fast...much faster than v.7. Anyone have any comments as to the speed of v.9 compared to v.8?

My personal opinion is v.9 is not anywhere near as fast as v.8.

...Allen

 

I usually use the bootable CD for imaging and can tell you that making images with version 8 is at least twice as fast as with the version 9 build 2337. I tested on multiple different systems and all had no disk problems that would cause slowdown. Version 8 wins hands down in the speed department at the present time. I am sticking with version 8.0 until they can fix the speed problem.

 

I believe it depends upon your hardware. I have a lot of LaCie .5 terabyte drives, Maxtor 300's and 250 drives. My hardware platforms consist of Dell P670 Precisions, GX270 and 280's, Latitudes C840, D600, D610.

THe P670 with internal SATA's drives will clone an image of 10gb in under 2 minutes. The GX270's with internal IDE drives take about 5-7 minutes.

The laptops with firewire are fast. I have FW800 LaCie's and their PCMCIA FW800 card in laptops and it's about 5 minutes. Maxtor's are the most reliable in external drives.

A Dell D410 laptop takes 10 minutes to clone a 5GB drive. These are initial rollout loads with OS and all apps installed. Run www.sysinternals.com NewSid and you are in business.

A Dell D610 laptop takes 2 hours for 10gb - I am working with Acronis to come up with a solution to fix the restore speed. They have been very helpful and fixed the speed issue with the D410. Backup speed is about 4 minutes.

I have been using their products for a couple years and it makes life easy, especially when supporting a lot of computers - 3 digits.

I have a site license on Ghost on am seriously considering replacing with Acronis because it is so much faster and works from CD better.

If you have SATA drives the product sings. It has saved many customers from hard drive death.

The only thing I see that would be an improvement is to make it work with Vista and port the 64bit to True Image Home. Vista will backup but not restore.

So, buy your hardware wisely.

 

Glad to see Acronis is helping you out but hardware has very little to do with the experiments I conducted using both versions on the same hardware. By doing it that way, it eliminates hardware from being the cause. So again, Acronis version 8.0 images twice as fast on the same hardware (in my tests)as using version 9.0. Is there anyone else who has tested both versions side by side on the same hardware and data?

Of course there will be differences in imaging times due to the type of data that is actually on the computer. How much of the data is already in compressed format?

 

None of the data is in compressed format. All is NTFS.
I did try it last night on a Compaq Presario low end with a Semprom or some silly chip from AMD and 1gb of RAM. If you load the software on the hard drive it takes 15 minutes to do 35gb to a Maxtor 300 USB 2.0 drive. If I boot with an Acronis recovery disk ( made on the same machine ) and try it, it takes 6 hours. I tried 8 also (I think the version was 903) and it wanted 1 day and 17 hours. Guess I'll stay with 9.

 

What I meant by compressed format is that some machines may have different amounts of zip files or tar files on them. The type of data makes a big difference in the time to create the image.

I judge acronis on how well the bootable CD works. If I need it, I expect it to work quickly just like it does with version 8 build 791 CD. When I first saw how fast it backed up and restored from the CD, I couldn't believe it. But the newest version just doesn't cut the mustard in my opinion and is a step backward. I'll stick with 8 for now. I should probably update to the latest version of 8 but I just havn't had any significant problems with it to motivate me to do so. In any case we are talking about different build numbers on version 8 so if you tried build 791 (don't know if you can still get it) then we would be comparing apples to apples.

One more point, if you have used this software for any length of time you know that the initial calculation given for how long the image creation will take is usually much longer than the actual time. I am talking about actual time not what the progress bar estimates. The progress bar doesn't begin to get accurate until the progress bar reaches the quarter to halfway point. If it takes longer than 7-10 minutes to get to the halfway point the disk has problems or linux is somehow setting the dma mode to PIO mode or some other horribly low setting. This is for an average amount of data on a disk (10-12gig).

 

v9 is faster than v8 by about a third (2 hours vs 3 hours to image, same parameters, in my case)

 

It's finally pretty stable, but I still prefer to use my TI8 Recovery CD (for restores only). For some reason it loads a lot faster than either the TI9 CD or the TI9 Recovery started from Windows methods.

 

As above, I reported the problem to Acronis about the D610 being slow to restore. They provided a solution in the form of a .iso file. Booted from that and now it takes 10 minutes to restore a 13gig drive and less than 20 for a 35gb drive (80gb with 35gb of data) from external Maxtor 300gb and LaCie 500gb drives.
I am a happy camper now and rolling out our new configuration.
Again, I believe it's the hardware used and how the bootup CD is configured for that hardware because the other worked fine.
A Dell Precision 670 using two internal SATA drives is incredibly fast - less than 2 minutes.
I sent them some screen shots of the Linux bootup of the Acronis 9 (2337) boot disk and within two days I had a solution. Thanks Acronis.