WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI 9.0.0.2289

I agree with you - all information, options and warnings should be before the Proceed button.
I would certainly feel nervous about using Snap Restore unless I had a complete disk clone backup.

 

anyone?

 

If I take what Acronis has said at face value and the user reads and acts on the message there will be no data loss if the user does kills the job at the warning box. As far as I'm concerned whether or not the box is before or after the Proceed is not a major issue although I think it would be better before than after.

The major issue is that a lot of user's won't even understand what it means to them.

 

I've been testing Acronis' newest release from their website, TI 9.1, and it still has the same problem with Snap Restore. I will not be buying the product because of this. Thanks for the great thread on this problem.

 

The only problem I see with it is that the warning message needs to be BIG and not possible to misinterpret.

Earlier tonight I decided to test snap restore (I'd really like to be able to at least do some surfing while waiting for the image to finish restoring after I've tested some software). I couldn't quite believe the warning meant what it seemed to mean. It wasn't terribly clear. But obviously I wasn't going to gamble on losing a 760GB data partition to test a snap restore of my 40GB system partition, so I hit cancel and came here to verify that I had interpreted the message right.

The best would of course be that they managed to figure out a way to make snap restore work without wiping out the entire volume. But apart from that, they really need to make that warning a whole lot more intimidating and clear to ensure average joe realizes what's at stake. More along the lines of skulls jumping up and down on the ruins of a harddrive while pointing at you and laughing, rather than the current "oh, and by the way, you might lose everything you have, but unless you know the difference between partitions, drives and volumes you probably won't even realize what I'm trying to tell you" warning.

 

Ditto for the new One-Click Restore feature. This also deletes any partitions that aren't present in the image being restored!!

Regards

 

Re: WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI 9.0.0.3633

I just downloaded the newest TI Home. 9.0.3633 and I didn't see the snap restore feature when booting from a rescue disk. I was trying to restore an image of a complete drive containing 3 partitions. I also attempted to restore an image of just one partition on a drive and neiter presented me with the snap restore option. I went to the help file and didn't see snap restore mentioned at all. It did have a blurb about Universal Restore, but I thought that was for the corp versions only. Did Acronis do away with snap restore already? or am I missing something. I am so used to ignoring it that I never noticed if it was still there. Can I only get to it from the secure zone? Which I do not have installed... It's still listed under the features of TI Home 9.0 on the website.

Anyone find the same thing? Please post your TI version number when replying.

Thanks

 

Yep. The option only pops up when you try to restore an image from secure zone.

 

Hi dscrap,

Sorry for any confusion. "One-Click Restore" isn't the same as "Snap Restore" (it's one of the Media Component options available when backing up to removable media). The point I was making is that it has the same potential for causing havoc, namely it wipes out any partions on the destination HD that are not contained in the image being restored and therefore should also have a BIG BOLD warning.

Regards

 

From the Users Guide:

Interestingly enough, you can select the "One Click Restore" and the full version of Acronis TI Home to removable media. Does it then prompt you to either use the full version or one click restore?

Is there another way to add "One Click Restore" to an image file? I normally create my images on a separate partition then burn to a custom bootable DVD from a bootable TI DVD ISO file that I inject the images to. It may just be me, but I find this method faster and less error prone.

Does the "One Click Restore" restore only one partition if that is what the image is of or will it overwrite the entire drive just to restore one partition on a multi partitioned drive wiping the remaining partitions? If the latter is the case, then a warning is definitely needed. I can't believe Acronis does not recognize the DANGERS they are putting the consumer in...

Thanks

 

Considering their slogan (at least it's in the about box) is "Compute with confidence", I couldn't agree more. Any functionality that has the destructive potential we are discussing here should require a fair amount of user input before the action is begun. The fact it was completely without warning in prior builds baffles me. If I had trialed ATI and tried to test snap restore a few months ago, I would have lost 700+GB of data. I don't think I have to spell out what kind of reaction that would have prompted.

Two things I would suggest being implemented.

1) A verbose explanation of the consequences. And by that I mean something a regular joe would be likely to understand. Then requiring the user to type "YES" to start the process. If it was me coding it, I would've added an extra "are you absolutely sure" yes/no dialog after that too.

2) The verbose explanation should have this sentence immediately before the text input field "If you do not fully understand the warning above, CLICK CANCEL NOW".

 

Re: Image Restore Taking Forever (18 hours so far)

I agree 100%

 

Build 3666 still does not have the warning before proceed. I did not go past proceed as well since the result could be disasterous. This is 9 months after you originally requested. That's just sad!!

 

Several months and builds later and still no resonable action taken by Acronis

Hi John,

Sad but typical of Acronis. The warning may still come after you click next after selecting snap restore, but anyone unknowingly wanting to try this is a fool. It's a shame, I really like the Acronis products, but they could be so much better if Acronis only listened. I can agree that some of the posts here are bogus, but mast are legit. They have lost many customers because of this.

I just do not understand what is going on at their offices. There seems to be little or no communication between departments and the different software lines. One build may have a great features or work perfectly with your hardware, but the next build would be missing said features or incompatible with your hardware that it previously recognized. HELLO? I don’t get it.

Another thing, besides the lack of responding to this thread and acting on the dangerous error, the time to create and restore images is always different from version to version of True Image. I just don't understand how one version could take 5-10 minutes to backup or restore and another version takes twice that amount of time. This isn't even a problem from version 8 to 9, but a consistent problem in all builds regardless of version number.

Well thanks for your post, hopefully we will get a response…

 

Re: Image Restore Taking Forever (18 hours so far)

Sadly, there still is not a warning prior to clicking proceed in TI Home version 10. What is so hard about putting the warning before clicking proceed? I didn't use snap restore for this reason alone. I have multiple partitions on my PC and if there is no warning after clicking proceed, then I am screwed. So I don't even dare click proceed to see if there is at least a warning after the proceed button.

Shame on you Acronis!! WAKE UP!

 

It's a wonder Acronis doesn't realize this is costing them return customers. I know the quirks of ATI9 now (i.e., what NOT to do). If I ever need to upgrade my imaging software for some reason (like, eventually, going Vista), I'll look very hard for a liveable alternative rather than upgrade to the unknown that is ATI10.

ATI is a data security product, yet it takes warning the user about potentially dangerous operations less seriously than World of Warcraft does for deleting one of your characters (you have to manually type in the word "delete").

I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Great product from a technical standpoint. But please hire someone that has common sense when it comes to designing user dialogs.

 

I am away for a while and it's about a year from the first post.
I can't believe the problem still there!

1. As TI is a data security product , any kind of possible dangerous action should be WARNED effectively NOT to cause users to lose precious data: NO MATTER he is not professional, inexperience about the product, or even just not careful enough or just by a quick click.

2. The designer must keep "data security" his first priority. Any features ,old or new, should be designed in to avoid to wipe out ANY part of data unnecessarily and software shoud be able to force users to be cautious enough to avoid to lose their precious data.
Otherwise , the feature should be deleted.

3. I am very happy with TI8, and am going to stick with it for "data security".

 

WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI 9 and 10

It has been a while since the first post... Acronis is really bad at actually implementing user requests or features. If you do get a response from them, it is usually generic or for a data dump of your system. For a security software company, you would think that such an easy mod in the software which would save a ton of trouble for unknowing users would be a priority. Shame on you Acronass.

 

cou<bump>gh

 

cou<do you get the feeling this is going nowhere>gh.

It seems that Acronis don't understand the desirability of having all checks and warnings before the Proceed button.
Perhaps you could try sending a Private Message to Alexy at Acronis Support.
Maybe you could get the point across to him.

 

Re: WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI Home 10

Well the saga continues. I was setting up a new computer and decided to test TI Home v10 to see if there was a warning for snap restore. I have 2 partitions, one for windows and one for documents. I always put my documents on D: drive so I can restore C: and not lose anything. Anyway since D: just had a bunch of empty folders from the "My Documents" folder in it, I installed TI Home 10 and made an image of C: to the secure zone. I then booted and hit F11 to get to the recovery and chose the secure zone as the source, C: image, and then snap restore. I saw proceed for snap restore and clicked it. Guess what. It started right away with no warning. BAD NEWS! I tried to hit cancel, but it wouldn't. So I hard booted my pc and got back to windows, but it was all messed up. I still had drive D:, but it wouldn't open. So there is still no warning and people are still at risk of losing all data stored on all partitions when using snap restore. You would think Acronis would have listened by now. My initial post was from October 2005. Anyone else have similar problems with the TI line or Acronis not listening to customer requests and repairing potentially entire system data loss issues?

HELLO ACRONIS!!!!!!

 

Re: WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI Home 10

Firstly, I don't think it is acceptable to have a feature like this which one cannot backout of before you finally start it. If there is no way to cancel when you expect it to then that is a problem.

The suggestions in this thread about providing better warnings are right on the money.

However. I actually agree that the correct place in the sequence for a cancel is after the proceed button has been pressed. This is a fairly standard user interface model. You execute a function, and then, it can offer a warning as a very last opportunity. For example, saving files from office applications, shutting a machine down, executing Del *.* (are you sure).

I think it is essential for good interaction design that user interface models are consistent, and whilst offering a cancel before Proceed may be acceptable, I would disagree that it is consistent with thousands of other designs where the warning is the last thing you do before a function starts (or cancels).

I think the confusion here has arisen because of a lack of confidence that the feature works at all. If there had been no problems with it then we wouldn't even be discussing the user interface.

I suspect Acronis have not changed this because in their opinion (and mine) the user interface is not broken.

F.

 

Re: WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI Home 10

If they don't consider a data security product wiping out every partition on a given volume without warning as broken, they don't deserve to sell a single copy ever again.

I have no need nor wish to touch ATI10, so I'm basing this on the poster that stated ATI10 offers no warning at all. At least ATI9 eventually got a warning added. Cryptic and inadequate it may have been, but at least it was something.

The fact it wasn't there to begin with, and apparently didn't get included in ATI10, shows a severe lack of common sense on behalf of the dialog designer. To such a degree that the person responsible really should find something else to do, in my opinion.

 

Re: WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI Home 10

Agreed.

I agree that that the way the dialogues have varied across builds smacks of implementation without design. Having said that, I personally don't have any objection to a warning after selecting the function. I would however hope that the function does what it is supposed to do and not leave you in a worse state that before you started.

F.

 

Re: WARNING Snap Restore erased my hard drive... TI Home 10

I don't really care when the warning is presented either. As long as it is before any changes are made.

The feature itself does work as designed. It is, for whatever technical reason, supposed to wipe out every partition on the volume in order to snap restore. The major issue is the fact you might have hundreds of gigabytes worth of data on those other partitions and it doesn't bother warning you about what it intends to do.

After all this time it still baffles me that anyone could manage to overlook the need for a very big warning. And it depresses me that Acronis still doesn't seem to understand what the problem is, even after all the posts about it.