A new build for Acronis Home 2009 should be coming

I just bought Acronis Home 2009. I previously had Acronis Home 11 installed.

One of the reasons I got it was hoping it would display the "time remaining" accurately when doing a backup. Acronis 11 had it all screwed up.

I have 2 hard drives (SATA). The 1st hard drive has 2 partitions, the 2nd hard drive has 1 partition. I also have a 3rd hard drive connected external to an sSata port on back of computer. I do full backups of the physical hard drives 1 & 2 to the 3rd hard drive. The very first time I did this full backup when I first installed Acronis 11, the time remaining timer worked perfect. That was the only time it did. All full backups after that, the timer was screwed up. The top progress would display right. The bottom one would not. As it was backing up the 1st partition of the 1st hard drive, the top and bottom progress bars would be displaying right but the time remaining was not accurate (only showed a few minutes when it should be been showing over an hour). As it went to the 2nd partition of the 1st hard drive, the top progress bar would start over as it should but the bottom total progress bar would then shoot to 100% and stay there for the rest of the backup, and the time remaining would be completely blank for the rest of the backup. This was with around 200 gigs to go.

I never had any issues with it completing a backup. It just seemed like Acronis 11 couldn't keep track of the time remaining.

Ok, now I get Acronis 2009 and try it again to see what's up. Did the same exact full back up. Everything looked fine at first, top and bottom bars were displaying accurately, time remaining was showing accurately, and I thought I was good to go.

I then minimized the progress box and then brought it back up from the taskbar. The time remaining (around 50 minutes for example) then popped back in accurately for about 10 seconds and then changed to about 4 seconds and started counting UP. Not counting up in real time, counting up maybe 3 or 4 seconds every couple of minutes. If I then minimized it again and brought it back up, the same process would start again (displaying correctly for the first 10 seconds or so and then reverting back to a few seconds and then counting back up).

I'm sitting there shaking my head thinking, "I can't believe they still don't have this right".

I went on Acronis web site tech support and they have a feature of being able to talk to someone direct live through like an instant message thing. I got connected to someone and we proceeded to talk about this issue. The guy actually re-produced it on his virtual machine as we were talking. He said he would be forwarding it to the build guys to get this fixed. Hopefully a new build will be coming soon. I have my fingers crossed and at the same time not holding my breath because Acronis 11 had timer issues (though not the same as this one) and it never did get fixed. I did mention that to the guy and he was aware of it.

As far as Acronis 2009 goes, the interface looks much better than Acronis 11. It is a little too dumbed down for me though. I'm a tech guy and I like to see a lot of information. With Acronis 2009, there is even less information during a backup than Acronis 11 had. With Acronis 11 it at least showed each drive as it was being backed up. Acronis 2009 doesn't even show that. It just shows each operation.

 

What build do you have? Mine is 12.0.0.9615.

 

Yep, that's the one I have. It's the only build that's currently listed.

 

Personally, the timing bars are for me a minor niggle, after all all timing bars for any software program even downloading ones (a 3 minute remaining download can still take 30 minutes ) are really for cosmetic purposes and to persuade the user to sit in front of a screen and be mesmorised (defrag any one? ).

I use another imaging program from a German company as well, it's more accurate, but it also suffers from the guestimation syndrome.

I wonder if Acronis, are trying to make the Home version to be as non techy as possible, leading those of us who like 'techy' to possibly Echo Workstation.

Colin

 

Maybe minor to some but it might as well work right if it's there. Something as simple as minimizing it and it never works right again is an annoyance to me. Right now as long as it's not minimizing during the backup, the timer and bars work very well and are pretty accurate.

 

There is a workaround which I use. TI runs scheduled backups for me. So they start in the background and I never have to look at the progress bars.
I do see the TI activity icon pop up in the task bar. Hovering over it will show progress as a percentage done. I don't normally look at that either. When it pops up it reminds me to go for lunch .

Xpilot

 

Well, as davidxtaylor said here, "...to me the only explanation can be that Acronis are saying that we are supposed to be using one of their Enterprise products if this is our need."

With your comment I took a look at Echo, but in the comparison chart I see many features of TI Home lacking, several of which I would miss:

• Try&Decide
• Exclude files and folders from Image Backup
• System State Backup (similar to NTbackup)
• Preserve files/folders during restore
• Restore a folder without the full path
• File Search
• Acronis Drive Cleanser™
• File Shredder
• System Clean-up
• T&D Across Reboots
• WDS and Google DS Support
• One-Click Protection
• Support for Zip Format