Vista problems with any Acronis product

I'm using the Image Workstation 9.1 and Disk Director products in Windows Vista Ultimate. Basically, I'm finding that very little if anything works from within a Vista session itself. Only the timed backups seem to work. For any kind of restore, Secure Zone partition, Disk Director partition change, etc., you must use the bootable CD.

Thankfully, most programs work very well from the bootable CD, much better than bootable CDs from Norton Ghost, etc. But it's disappointing to think you have a GUI, wizard driven system for doing things like mounting backup images within Vista, and this never seems to work. Or that if you just want to go and recover one folder or a few files, you must reboot your entire machine to get them out of the backup volume.

In reality, this sets things back to the older Norton Ghost versions before 10-11, at least within Vista. From what I'm reading, XP users also are getting inconsistent results with anything from within the OS, but okay performance with bootable CD.

Again, this is a shame, because the Acronis GUI, wizards, and flexibility are wonderfully setup--if only they would work as advertised. Reading the various forum posts, that is the one consensus: Acronis backs up files okay, but if want to play with partitions or recover, you'd better only use the bootable CD. At least Norton is honest about this: don't trust the OS version, use our CD with PC-DOS and everything is guaranteed to work. With Acronis they should say, "This is a Linux product that also does stuff to Windows installations. Only trust our bootable Linux product to maninpulate your Windows backup files and partitions, and don't bother much with the Windows partitioning and backup stuff.."

I'm going to wait for other vendors to finally release their Vista GUI versions, some in only a few days, and then see if I'll keep using Acronis stuff. Again, it was very promising, and much better than Microsoft's Vista backup stuff, but not as good as some of the older XP tools like Ghost 10.0. They should be, they could be, the Acronis folks aren't doing enough testing or admitting problems in the beta before release. I'm afraid this is the rule with software companies now, releasing final stuff that should still be in beta, relying on paying customers to do the beta testing in the forum

This is why I pay for so little nowadays, getting it form corporate clients and partners to try out first. About one in five programs really works as advertised. But we waste a lot of time being "reverse-paid" beta testers for the vendors.

 

That`s my opinion,too.

 

Unfortunately that's the track record for True Image and when you combine that with a new OS like Vista, that's a recipe for, well, not quite disaster, but close to it.