Some Personal Impressions on True Image Misery and Open Letter to Acronis Management

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My name is Franz "Francis" Mueller and I am owner of a small (but successful ) IT company in Germany, primarily engaged in IT support and consulting.

Some weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get a free license of True Image 7 Personal Edition which was advertised within a German Computer magazine. Of course, the name Acronis and True Image were known to me before, but up to that moment, I used and advised my customers competing brands. As my customers and myself were completely satisfied with these competing products, there was no reason shifting to another software.

However, the company of the relevant image software was bought by another company and ceased to exist. Thus, it was time to look for an alternative. After some testing with True Image 7 PE, it made a really good impression on me. As a consequence, I concluded that True Image might be a product to recommend our customers in case they don't need state-of-the-art enterprise solutions. Furthermore, True Image is available for Linux, which is a relevant feature, IMO.

Most of our customers are small and medium-sized companies, including industry, craftman's enterprises, traders, small local banks etc. Of course, we have home users, too. (Including U.S. citizens from U.S. military community in my area.) Most of those business customers don't have own professional IT departments. Therefore, these partners -- as well as home users -- really need and want absolutely reliable products, and they rely upon my employees and me that we recommend them only such products.

As I wrote above, I considered recommending True Image to my customers. True Image 9 came out some weeks ago, and it's quite normal to deal with the most recent version. However, as a prerequisite, I decided to firstly test this software and to follow this support forum for a while. Sorry to say that, but when browsing through the board, the amount of problems encountered with TI9 is really shocking. Build 2245 RTM, followed by several updates (2247, 2259, 2270, 2271 - German Edition -, 2273). Today, it seems like English build 2273 has been withdrawn and we are back to build 2270. I frankly admit, too, that I have never seen a software in this demanding field which was updated so many times immediately after market introduction.

Based on my experience, I know that new software will not be completely error-free, and that there is always a certain amount of complaints, which are caused not by the software but by the user behind the computer. Nevertheless, when I follow the huge mass of complaints on this board and when I realize so many new updates come and go, I have to conclude that the current software version is still not mature. I could not take responsibility recommending (or selling) customers or my friends True Image 9. (And indeed, I have not started to test the Demo version myself extensively.) Imaging software is extremely crucial software. It often deals with most valuable and sensitive user data. If such an image is corrupt or damaged, user data probably is irrecoverably lost. And the customer might be lost, too.

I really hope that your software engineers will get the difficulties under control. True Image 9 has many exclusive and nice features, but they are worthless if the product itself is not working reliably.

Best regards,

 

Hello Francis2,

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

I recommend you to download and test the latest build (2289) of Acronis True Image 9.0. Please note that if you encounter any problem please contact us and the problem will be fixed in the short time.

Thank you.
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Irina Shirokova