A Message to the Acronis Corporation

So far Acronis TI10 is the best backup software I've found.

Having said that, I am monumentally ticked off at Acronis. I'm an ex-IBMer, coder, debugger, support and everything else, and I hate badly written and poorly documented software.

These backup locations were the last straw. How it's implemented is so convoluted, counterintuitive, and weird. It has cost me so much time to figure out, and I still don't trust them.

There is no more important PC utility than backup software. None! And Acronis is so close to being a decent product. But how can I possibly recommend it to my customers with all this?

A big problem is the fact that your support personnel seem to speak English as a second language. If we could really communicate with them and if they would listen to us we could straighten this out pretty quickly.

Do you hear that Acronis! Your corporate offices are in Burlington, MA. Are you really there? Is English your first language? If not, then go out and hire someone who does speak English as a first language (not techie English, but HUMAN BEING ENGLISH, if you understand what I mean.) Find someone who can actually communicate and also knows technical stuff, pay them what they’re worth, and put that person on your support staff.

Hire me if you like. I make $100 an hour as a consultant – but I can’t take on any more clients at that rate. You pay me $150/hr and I’m your boy. It will be the best money you ever spent. I’ll turn Acronis into the Google of backup software. It will blow away Stompsoft and every other backup product.

Do you remember AltaVista? Do you know why there is only Google now, why Alta Vista and all the rest are long gone? Because Google put a spell check into their search engine – that’s why. Only highly technical individuals could possibly be SO STUPID as to create an elegant search engine and then tell their users OVER AND OVER AND OVER again to check their spelling.

And YOU, DEAR ACRONIS, are failing in the same way. You are 90% of the way there. Why stop now?

And if you think that my little tantrum here is over the line, then think again. I’ve easily put a dozen hours into trying to figure out your stupid software. That’s weekend overtime hours – late at night, Saturday and Sunday – time better spent with my family. So how much did you cost me in real dollars and cents, with your ‘Almost Good Enough’ product?

I put in those hours because I care about my customers and my customers must have good working backup systems. It must be easy to use and it must be FAILSAFE.

So, dear Arconis, will you be the Google of backup software or the AltaVista? When you’ve figured that out call or send me an email. I’ll be here waiting.
Yours truly,
Alan

Alan L. Silverman
Computing Solutions
Stone Ridge, NY 12484
(845) 687-9458
alanlsilverman [at] yahoo.com
http://alanlsilverman.virtualave.net

 

Sorry it took you so long to figure out the Managed Backup Locations. It didn't take all of us that long -- even those of us that made the intuitive mistake of creating a task and choosing the directory as the destination but not picking it from the Backup Locations.

I think the biggest prob with ATI is not the service (compared to most other software makers), or how intuitive the program is, but those darn linux drivers on the boot cd.

What the heck happened to IBM, btw? Haven't they gone off to mine much more parochial markets than they did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s? Pardon me, just poking fun. IBM's DOS was a better product than MS-DOS although version 4 (I think it was) had the curious bug of grabbing and never releasing a chunk of memory when you called a batch file -- call enough files and all memory was used up.

regards,

 

Exactly! Thank you for wording my frustrations. I'm trying to use the product to do exactly what they say it will do but it does not work. They keep emphasizing RTFM but that does not help me. And the broken English instructions leave me wondering if they understand my question to start with. I too have spent countless hours on doing a simple task but the path seems vague and so far hasn't yielded a successful operation. I just want to replace my 2 40GB drives with one larger SATA drive. Seems simple but it won't work from the user perspective. Why wouldn't example scenarios be a good aid to us lesser techie people out here? It would also be sure they have actually run the code through different paths to verify system test scenarios. I'm also a long time IT person with much experience but this is giving me much problems.
Thanks again for trying to get these people to do the right thing.
Charles

 

Go tell it to AltaVista.
ALS

 

ALS you might benefit from trying Paragon software.

 

Thanks. I'm looking at their web page.
Al

 

I thought your problem was to do with Acronis' support. You may be interested to hear that I am still awaiting for Paragon support to reply to me regarding a problem I had with one of their products eight months ago.

Acronis are slow and their English could be better, but at least they do always eventually respond to support requests.

F.

 

No, my problem has to do with the product as a whole. I need a backup/recovery product that meets all my requirements. Paragon doesn't seem to have an effective function for limiting the amount of disk space used, so it's been eliminated from contention.

Acronis' product is the best there is. The clone feature is fantastic. But the product is still badly documented, functionally irrational, and after considerable testing I still haven’t been able to reliably predict the program’s responses. For instance, when I specify the number of incremental backups to be done before a new full backup is created, and then run the task by clicking on the checkered flag on the task list, it doesn’t seem to just create a whole new full backup and start from the beginning. It seems to create a full backup plus the same number of incrementals – time after time. Is this a feature or a bug? Now add these technical uncertainties to the communication problems with Acronis support/development and what do you have?

The program I want from Acronis is what they should want too. Because, per the AltaVista-Google analogy, when everything shakes out there will only be a single dominant backup-recovery application, and that will be the one that finally does everything truly required of a good backup-recovery program, does it well and so anyone can use it. If Acronis keeps on screwing around, sitting on the lead they now have, I guarantee they will end up like AltaVista. For a succinct history of that company, take a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

A key feature of the ‘winning’ backup-recovery program must be the ability to specify the amount of disk space put aside for different types of backups. Otherwise worried customers will call me asking why they’re getting a message that their hard drive is running out of disk space. And that is not pleasant. Even more unpleasant is the thought that one of my customers might have a hard drive failure and then find that the backup-recovery program I personally recommended to them in fact didn’t work.

By the way, this is also in response to shieber’s snotty little comment above:
“Sorry it took you so long to figure out the Managed Backup Locations. It didn't take all of us that long.”

Most of my time has not been taken up trying to figure out how the backup locations work (which, by the way, is idiotic), but whether the product really works at all.

Best,
Al

PS And yes, I’m serious when I say that the best thing Arconis could do would be to actually pay me for my input.

Alan L. Silverman
Computing Solutions
Stone Ridge, NY 12484
(845) 687-9458
alanlsilverman [at] yahoo.com
http://alanlsilverman.virtualave.net

 

Alan,

I agree with every word. I too have predicted that Acronis' time at the top is limited since their underlying philosophy towards after sales especially, is flawed IMHO. They do however appear to be best of breed at the moment, but I don't expect this to last forever. The fact that their added value bells and whistles in the later versions are irrelevant (to me) I just need image backup and restore and possibly clone, is an indication that they are now starting to struggle to differentiate their product from the rest. The clock is ticking.

F.

 

Image backup and restore, file backup and restore, and clone. All they need is to make those really work.

Like the ticking crocodile, in Peter Pan.
ALS

 

What about ShadowProtect? I trialed ATI earlier in the year and had so many problems with it, posting here with issues that were never answered or answered after my trial ended. I've never used software that was so buggy and incapable of performing the tasks it was supposed to do.
Using ShadowProtect now and just a great program (other than cost).

 

Folks,

This is the Acronis Support Forum. If you wish to discussion competitive products, feel free to do that in the appropriate forum on this site (for example software & services), not this subsection. Thanks in advance.

Blue

 

sorry

 

Yes that is all that is needed, but then there would be no reason for a new version to sell to us, other then when MS comes out with a new operating system. There would only be driver updates for the rescue disk, no money
to be made there.