True Image 2009 – Brilliant, thank you Acronis

As the title says a big thank you to Acronis for the latest version of True Image. I have at long last a version that truly works and appears to be without fault.

As many of you will know if you have read my posts I have had a long running issue with recoveries using the Acronis Loader. With versions 9 and 10 an image recovery 60 gig had been taking 17 hours (didn’t even try it with version 11). Following Mustangs VistaPE builds thankfully that had been reduced to approximately 25 minutes.

I was then very disappointed with all the negative posts I have been reading on this forum regarding True Image 2009. However, I thought nothing ventured nothing gained so downloaded the latest build trial version.

I like the new GUI – very much a Vista experience and I don’t find it “dumbed down” as some people have commented.

Now for performance – A full backup took 22 minutes – the initial progress bar stated it would take 42 minutes but the progress bar reached the end in 22 minutes with the progress bar still stating 22 minutes to go so that is a little buggy.

Now for the acid test i.e. recovery. I didn’t have a VistaPE disk for 2009 so pressed the recovery button with some trepidation. The Acronis loader initially stated 23 hours to go and I thought “here we go again”. However, the 23 hours quickly started counting down and within the minute was now stating 35 minutes and that is how long it took an astonishing 35 minutes to restore 60 gig. I can now use this product with confidence and the plus being I don’t even need to rely on VistaPE for recoveries. For weekly full backups this is the product for me. Thanks again Acronis.

 

I found that ATI12/2009 worked on hardware setups that ATI10 and the dreaded ATI11 would not. That's very good news, imo. Now if they only didn't strip out automated management of Full backups, then I wouldn't have demanded a refund and reverted to ATI10 again.

 

Can someone clarify in detail what this stripping out of automated management of full backups is? As far as I can see you could set a schedule to backup your system how ever often and you can do the same with 2009, you can set a size limit or a number of backups in all versions. All I want to do is set Acronis to do a full backup once a week and store just one months worth of backups.

 

Faust,

I'll be interested in the replies you receive. The problem is if your want a full backup say every Saturday and would like to retain the prior three backups. There is no easy way to set this up. In order for each of your full weekly backups not to overlay the prior you’re going to have to set four scheduled entries, one for each of the four weeks with unique archive names. Now this is where the fun begins. You'll have to tell each of your schedule backups to run every four weeks so that you can have a four week rotation. It's all good so far, but in the scheduler these is no place to define a Start Date. Therefore over the next four weeks you're going to have to manually introduce a new backup each week until you have your four sets in rotation. If for any reason your sets or schedule fails, you'll need to start this process back at the beginning. I'm amazed that a company like Acronis with their technical knowledge would have missed the mark on the scheduler. If you look online at other image package schedulers they all have a Start / Suspend / End Dates. Regarding auto deletion. The only way I've found is to use the multiple scheduler entries allow them to overlay a previous backup, etc. The consolidate function, is not the same as a retention date with auto deletion, etc. If you really want to have fun, try to insert an Incremental backup on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, between each of your four weekly backups. I’m on the fence right now if this whole scheduler thing is a deal breaker for me! Good Luck!

 

Re: True Image 2009 – Brilliant, thank you Acronis

You don't have to look at competitors to find this functionality. Acronis True Image had it in version 11. It worked very well, and allowed automated management of a set of Full backups based on user setting a maximum number of images to retain, or maximum total folder size, or other options. All we need is for Acronis to take the automated management of Full backups that they had in ATI11 and include it in an update to ATI2009.

 

Hmm! yes I begin to see what you are saying having looked at the tasks in TI 2009. I can only do a full backup followed by incremental backups - the interface won't let me select full backups as I already have one and even if I could then it states that the original backup would be overwritten. This doesn't appear to be the case with TI 10. Am I right in my interpretation? If so why can you no longer perform multiple full backups? Having said that, incremental would still give you an up to date system though I don't know what happens when you reach the limit on the number of backups which you specify? Will TI 11 do multiple full backups to a backup location or does that overwrite the original too?

 

With ATI10 you could automaticlly create as many Full backups as you wanted and ATI would automatically give each file a unique name and automatically delete excess files when they exceed user set limits for number, total size, or age. In ATI12/2009, the only thing you can do automaticlly with Fulls is have only one file that keeps getting ovewritten -- thus, we describe it as a giant step backward.

If you want to use incs and diffs the situation is a bit diff -- Although, instead of spending time doing Full backups, you spend it doing consolidations. I didn't test it out on 12 but I'm not sure if more than one full is ever kept if doing automation consolidation.

 

It appends 001, 002 etc to the filename. You can have as many as you want.

 

Thanks for the info. Why do Acronis recommend you make incrementals after making a full, as they seem to be against doing multiple full backups. I'm not aware that having an archive stuffed with full backups causes an issue with recoveries and HD space is hardly an issue anymore. I'm quite sure that restoring from incrementals works fine too but we are having the option of selecting which backup we want to restore taken away from us.

 

Having only one Full Image and its related Incrementals is like having all of your eggs in one basket. I'm afraid they got a little carried away when they were attempting to dummy down the interface. It would have been nice if they had preserved what they had (much better scheduling and archive control) and created an interface with a selectable skill set level, i.e. Beginner, Novice, Expert. This option then could control what detail options are available for the end user. Instead they sacrificed things they thought were to complex for the everyday user or order to appeal to the mass market.

 

I actually have the Acronis scheduler set for two backup tasks - each Saturday Acronis backs up to the external drive, one full backup followed by three incrementals up to the months end, then on the Sunday exactly the same process takes place to the computers internal slave drive. Using this method I am I feel perhaps splitting my eggs between two baskets. Whilst not quite as secure as using multiple full backups I still think it's a reasonably sure bet for the preservation of my system and data. Whilst it is always possible for one of the images to be corrupt it's not likely for both images to suffer the same fate at the same time.