Is TI 8 Dependable?

I purchased TI 8 about 10 days ago. I had a system problem after installing it which was resolved and I am currently having a minor system problem every time I use it (which is still under investigation).

I think the NUMBER 1 requirement of backup software is DEPENDABILITY. I may back up 20 times or 200 times without ever needing to restore, but when I do need to restore that restore MUST work, PERIOD.

Reading the posts in this forum has cast considerable doubt on whether I can depend on TI when I need it. My previous software (DriveImage 2002) was not as nice as TI in many respects but it NEVER failed me when I needed to do a restore.

I understand that this forum is for problems and that for every post here there may be 500 totally satisfied users. But I would really like some of you who have more experience with TI to let me know whether I can depend on TI to restore my system correctly and without problems when I need to do a restore.

 

Hi drac,

I totally agree with you, all your questions. I have searched and read a lot before decide to try TI 8, just wanting to be sure that I can restore my system when i need. But until now, after only few days of trying, I really felt sorry for my choice. It ran smooth at first, but then when I tried to restore (just a test) it said MFT error ( I have posted a separate thread on this problem). And now things got even worse when I deleted the Secure zone to recover my space. IT ran OK and said successfully deleted it. But then I could not see the recovered space on my drive. It just desappeared even after reboot twice. Now I really regret trying IT.

 

One thing to make sure of is that the image is not corrupt. I am running 2 SATA drives, and if I image from one to the other, the image is ALWAYS corrupt. If I image from one partition to another on the same drive, the image is fine. Others on here have had the same problem, and resolved it by changing the P2P discard time on the BIOS. Unfortunately, my board is an ASUS, and the BIOS does not offer that setting.

At least I found out before I needed the image.

Grant

 

Hmm. I thought SATA support was one of TI's advantages over Powerquest Drive Image (now Ghost). I'm still trying to decide which way to go, TI or Ghost. Good Luck.

 

DI/Ghost uses an XP style boot cd needing an F6 Floppy special to use SATA/RAID drives. Its slower than a 386 66mhz with 4mb ram booting to the cd as well. Yukkk!

 

It's so dependable in my box that I use it as an uninstaller at times (for example after installing TurboTax DeLuxe I knew that the unwise routine provided by the app would not rid my system of unwanted .dlls, .ocxs, etc, so I created an image before installing the gizmo, and a week after when I got the refund, I restored the image. TurboTax never existed in my system).

 

David

I thought the same thing. That's why I bought TI. It supports SATA, within limits. The problem for me is that it won't let me image from one drive to the other. I don't like the idea of only imaging from one partition to the other on the same drive. If the drive itself packs up, I have no backup.

I've been going back and forth with tech support on this, and they will not acknowledge that it is anything but my specific PC. I've told them that there are threads on this forum about this problem, and how the guys with Abit boards resolved it. But, all they want me to do is to try running from the boot CD and other variations. Where I boot from has nothing to do with the problem.

Grant

 

It is very much system dependent, as I image my SATA drive to my 2nd physical drive without a problem. It is not a problem with SATA HDDs but with their controllers, as some of them are not recognized, but most of them are as far as people I know goes.

 

Maybe Acronis could provide a list of known compatible and incompatible controllers?

 

I hate to sound like i work for Acronis but the SATA support issue isn't that bad for everyone. I have four SATA HDs, two raptors on the Intel ICH5R and two seagates on the promise 20378. I image from and to varios drives without a miss. My controllers have been around for a while so perhaps Acronis has had time to work out any bugs. The F11 boot option as well as booting from disc and the Secure Zone all have worked flawlessly once I figured them out with acronis's help. I've also used TI as an uninstaller and it's been a life saver. It's by far the best investment I've ever made in software.

 

Feddupp and others

I didn't want to sound like I was bashing Acronis. That's why I mentioned the BIOS issue. I don't think my problem is the SATA controller. It is a Silicon Image 3112A - the same as the one used on many Abit boards. Abit, however, has a BIOS setting for the "P2P discard time", which as I understand it, is a timing for reads and writes from the disks. If you slow this setting down, TI can image across the disks. Asus does not have this setting in the BIOS, so I cannot slow down the default. At the default of 30us, both the Abit boards and the Asus boards have the same problem. For some reason, the "other imaging software" can image across my disks anyway. I would like to get TI to do it, but it would appear that, without the BIOS setting from Asus, I am out of luck.

Grant

 

agreed, 26hours to restore an image is just not something that our business can use. I'm testing this software on a new platform we are moving to, i've created the image from 2 250gig mirrored drives, with a 3ware 9000-8 8channel raid controller, the system was 2 mirrored and 4 in a raid 5 which I did not need to image... acronis crashed or hardlocked the system every time untill I removed the raid 5 disks. Then it took only 4 hours to create the image. But a restore to both mirrored drives took 26 hours and a restore to just one degraded mirrored drive took 14+ hours.

Knowing which cards it supports would make a huge difference. As this card that we use was not supported, we would not have spent 900$ us on acronis enterprise 8 for windows and would have gone looking for another solution.