Acronis True Image Home 2010:

Me and Acronis have had a love/hate relationship. Their products have had so much potential and yet it has had a fundamental flaw. Acronis products have great features but if it doesn't backup and restore reliably then there is no reason to use it.

Acronis True Image Home 2010 has learned much from ShadowProtect, but the question remains if they have applied what they learned into this product. I have struggled with Windows 7 compat problems with my favorite backup software and that has left me looking for other options.

Acronis now has continuous incremental backups but they call it 'Non stop backup' which has a Time Machine like interface so you can restore files from certain dates and such but I don't see an option where you can specify the time to do these backups like from 7am to 5pm or something like that. I will be testing this function out thoroughly to see if it is as good as advertised.

Windows 7's internal backup system is also compatible with Acronis and there is a nice boot system where you can boot to an archive from True Image or the default Windows Backup. You can convert between the two which is a nice touch.

True Image 2010 has a backup system where instead of mounting an archive you can click on it and it displays all the folders and files and you can easily copy them. I am not sure if TI2010 can restore an OS on another machine using Universal Restore.

The interface is clean and functional. I will put True Image 2010 through hell and report back.

EDIT: Ugh the nonstop backup module takes up 168mb and there are no real options to control it.
The interface is pretty nice but isn't that feature rich.

Screenshots: http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/screenshots.html

 

Yes please do that. I am considering upgrading to Acronis 2010 when my Win7 order comes in next month. It would be nice to read your comments after putting the new version through extensive testing.

 

any screenshots?

 

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/screenshots.html

 

its a nice simple interface, i like it

 

ATI is bloated beyond belief. I won't use it just because of that.

 

seems pretty simple and straightforward to me, how is it bloated?

 

The demo is 110.4 MB. In comparison, Drive Snapshot is 250kb, ShadowProtect is 16MB, Image for Windows is 7MB. The installation package is bigger than John Goodman.

 

I'm still using true image 10 and it is a good software. True image does something many of the other imaging softwares won't do, it lets you restore a larger partition onto a smaller partition even the vaunted shadowprotect won't do that.

If I upgrade to windows seven, I might finally update my true image. I tested the demos of the previous true image 11/12 and never encountered any problems.

True image isn't any more bloated than vista or seven. It's normal progress in software development.

 

I use ATI 2009, I don't have it installed though. I just use the acronis recovery manager at boot up and do all of my backups and restores from that. I don't need it running real time on my pc. One thing I will say about Acronis is that I never had any problems with my images after they were restored. It has always been reliable to me. I don't have it installed though, so I can't say much about that aspect. When I did have it installed about a year ago on Vistax64, I had a few issues with it. Slowing down windows startup, and when I would open the program it would take forever it seemed to scan the disks. I was told that a hotfix for vista fixed the issue, but I had already uninstalled it then and started just using the recovery manager. Probably will do the same with Win7. I know that I would browse their forum every now and then and there seemed to be a lot more people upset with the product than you would see in your average forum.

 

I really like the new "Try & Decide" feature !!

 

is it strong?
i tested acronis 2009 try&decide feature with killdisk viruses, system was damaged.
i dont know how is new version.

 

The trial installer included the bootable ISO, I think...

 

An imaging program that isn't virtually 100% reliable is completely worthless. I dumped Acronis long ago for Paragon Drive Backup, and have never had to worry since. It has saved my system numerous times.

There seem to be numerous other reliable ones out there too. There is just no reason to agonize over Acronis.

 

And you call an application bloated simply because of the installation size?! What a ridiculous statement. Try out G-Data IS 2010 and you'll have kittens! (245mb installation file).

By the way, being using ATI 2010 since it was released and not had any problems - just like my experience with 2009 I used before that. But hey, go with what you know and what works for you.

 

agreed plus version 9 didnt work for me and left drivers and services behind after uninstall.

 

What happened to the Acronis Forum? - I come back and its gone!

 

It has moved to its own website/forum
http://forum.acronis.com/

Details here...
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=251020

 

Try and Decide has been around for a couple years. It's basically leverages the volume shadowing capability of TI into a Shadow Defender/Returnil-like security feature. I haven't used it in a while but I recall it being slightly sluggish compared to Shadow Defender.

 

Same here, Acronis lost me when I upgraded to Vista and it wouldn't create reliable images or restore them properly. Additionally, their tech support was horrible.

 

A quick look in their forums suggests that nothing much has changed. Several users are reporting serious bugs (ie. BSOD) with the Try&Decide filter driver.

 

I've been using the Acronis Continuous Backup
and it is very useful. It has a time machine like interface to restore
files and the running app uses around 43MB. You can exclude data. I got it down to just continually backing up the application data of the administrator. You can validate all backups in the options. The main acronis app is a memory hog but this years versions has some nice features. One feature I don't see is how to burn your backup as a restore disk.

 

I have not used Acronis products...for more than a year, because it failed twice to restore my pc. Then I decided to try Paragon's products and never looked back again.