holiday upgrade $29 a good deal?

Quote from Acronis e-mail:

Dear Acronis True Image Customer,
Happy Holidays from all of us at Acronis!

Haven't upgraded to the new Acronis True Image 10 Home yet? Upgrade today and get a FREE 1-year Upgrade Protection plan! If you buy the Upgrade from this e-mail during the Holiday Season (limited time offer) you will receive all future major product upgrades for one year from the date of the purchase FOR FREE!

Save $29.99 on the next Upgrade and stay updated!

I'm a ATI 8 and 9 owner and regard it as my most basic defense against anything (even my own stupidity). What are the chances of acronis making the "backup to DVD" a smoothe no brainer? I have no new hardware and both TI 8 and 9 work fine except for the DVD thing which i haven't even tried due to the many laborious posts. Anyway I'm pondering the purchase due to the year of free upgrades (TI 11 ?). I don't throw out cash for the fun of it but TI is my most basic defense (go back in time!) tool. Worth it or not?

 

Unless you need some of the new features, I wouldn't upgrade. TI 10 is quite buggy, which is the norm for TI releases.

 

Versions of TI are rarely smooth at first that's why the year of upgrades was the most lucrative part of the offer. I'm still hoping Acronis will make DVD backups smooth and silky (fantasyland perhaps!).

 

Quite buggy ? Thats a rather general statement, dont you think ?
I have it(TI 10), installed and I have only found one feature thats already been identified as having a problem, It is the back up email process. That can be worked around by desiginating the email folders/files in another section of TI 10'S menus. I have had complete problem free use of the software in all other aspects. A few have posted about the process of upgrading ver 9 to ver 10 and that process may be troublesome, however I could not agree in concluding that TI 10 is "quite buggy".

 

I can't speak to the "buginess' of TI 10. I wouldn't be pondering the upgrade if i owned it. Personally I had very little problems with TI 8 or 9 but my buginess statement may come from monitoring Wilders accounts of others problems. It's bug free enough that I'm quite devoted to TI and am pondering an investment in the future potential of the program. I'd like someday to backup smoothly to DVD but i may have to give up on that one. Even without that feature TI is a stellar product.

 

The trouble is that one has to consider whether it works for everybody, not whether it just works for you. The general perception is that TI 10 has not yet matured. This is no different to V7,8 & 9 for the first 3 or 4 months of their life by the way.

I'm pleased it works for you, but this is not an office application - others may not be as lucky.

F.

 

Most definitely. Don't worry about the buggy comments - as far as you are concerned they are pretty much irrelevant. For the price of a sandwich a cup of coffee and a reasonable tip you get the latest version. If you are like me you will find that the most important features work. If you are unlucky and find significant bugs you can go back to using 9 or even 8 and wait for the inevitable patch. In any event you will have bought the latest version for a $29.99 discount.

 

I know that many will disagree but I don't think that backing up DIRECT to DVD is a good idea. I prefer to make an image to another partition or drive and then burn to DVD. I believe that a better burn is made this way.

 

You can get upgrade versions for less than $29.99, e.g., at CompUSA.

AFAIK, you'd be able to get updates to version 10 as long as version 10 were updated. If there were a version 11 within a year, then maybe the offer would be worth while.

 

Nice point Howard, and if history is anything to go by I would expect v11 to come out in the next 9 or 10 months.

F.

 

I'm leaning towards doing it.

I install swappable hard drive bays in my PCs so I trust that backup medium the most however I'd still like the option of backing up to DVD without a lot of conditions or workarounds. I trust Acronis to continue development although perfection seems elusive. So far my investment in Acronis products has been quite sound. Peace of mind in the world of computing is hard to find.

 

Some companies may avoid such a release just to get it out of the 12 month window.

In particular, let's say the current Acronis offer ends 31 Jan 2007, all Acronis has to do is wait until 1 Feb 2008 to release version 11.

A bigger concern is the folkes that post here, and elsewhere, alledging that certain bugs in TI 9 were not corrected in TI 10. A particulary troubling comment was posted at the CompUSA web site.

 

Personally I don't see anything worthwhile in TI10 - except Vista compatibility.
However, I very much doubt I'll be buying Vista anytime soon.
So I'll wait until TI11 before considering an upgrade.
The holiday deal for $34.99 with free one year upgrade offer might be worth considering if there were any guarantee that version 11 would be released within 12 months. If there wasn't a release then it would be a total waste and I imagine there would be some more unhappy customers. Even if there was an upgrade it would be a bit of a punt in assuming version 11 features will be useful to me. If not, then I would have wasted my $34.99 now (yes, my email offer was $34.99 not $29.99). I'll wait and consider spending $29.99 or whatever is the offer on the upgrade in a year.

 

doubtful

I'm becoming more doubtful about the upgrade. My hardware is old and from the TI 10 posts I've seen it could take a while to recover my investment if at all. TI 8 and 9 work fine even without the image to/from DVD functionality.