Acronis, it was good while it lasted

Did these guys outsource their software engineering department to Indochina?
As someone who has been using their products for years, it really saddens me to see the state of their current software. Yes, B&R 10 works to a degree but is 600-900MB necessary for a corporate imaging app? Seems a little excessive to me.

Even the home version, wow, talk about feature creep! Try & Decide, yeah, ok this sounds good but what does it have to do with imaging? Online Backup? Hope you have a 100Mbps internet link to backup all those gigabytes. Nonstop Backup? Ahem, seems kind of cpu/hard drive intensive. DriveCleanser? Instead of waiting for a drive wipe you might as well just smash the drive with a hammer & replace it with a new one. I think someone at Acronis forgot they are in the drive imaging business.

I've been using Echo Workstation for several years but it's nearing it's retirement at my company with the advent of Windows 7. Unfortunately, after using it for so long I'm at the point where it'll have to be pried out of my cold dead heads.

 

have to say i agree they went south they way of bloatware

 

It's not even the bloat as much as the fact that their product is just unreliable at this point. They are trying too hard to offer too many things nobody wants. I was quite disappointed when the Echo series was dropped and doesn't work on Windows 7. I've had to find an alternative and unfortunately I have found nothing that I am completely happy with.

 

I was able to install the agent on Win 7 clients & use that for making images from the management console. It's a temporary solution until I can find a replacement I fully like.

 

I use Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 from a BartPE disk. It requires ~140 MB. It amazes me how Drive Snapshot can perform pretty much the same functions at under 300 KB. But I still like Acronis because (1) it is very fast for both backup and recovery, although ymmv depending on the hardware, and (2) it allows for both fast and slow incremental backups. As far as I know the only other imaging program that offers fast incrementals is Macrium Reflect, but it doesn't have good command line support and recoveries are significantly slower than with Acronis B&R 10 on my laptop. (fwiw, Macrium takes under 6 MB of space on my BartPE disk).

*my understanding is that fast incrementals are based on comparing file sizes and time stamps while slow incrementals compare checksums. the slower method is more reliable, but sometimes so slow that it defeats the point imo.

 

I like Drive Snapshot but it swings too far to the other extreme for me. I'll use the command line when I absolutely have to but I like a decent user interface. I made a WinPE 7 boot disk with Drive Snapshot but it was a bit overkill for my needs. It took a relatively long time to boot & I couldn't get connected to a network share. I'll have to play around with it some more. I'm sure it's an E.S.O. problem.

 

ATI 11 has never let me down, and its very light. ATI 11 does everything I need it to do without all the added crap I don't need. It creates restore images fast, and restores my machine fast. No failed restore jobs. I used ATI 2010, and it was horrible! I got nothing, but error message with ATI 2010 even with a fresh install. It was never dependable in restoring my machine. I uninstalled it, and said good riddance! Is anyone here using ATI 2011? I was hoping they would fix all the issues I had with ATI 2010. I will have a new W7 x 64 machine by the end of the week, and I would like to install Shadow Protect on it, but it's so expensive! I sometimes wonder how many customers they loss due to their price. I may have to go with ATI 2011, Macrium Reflect, or Keriver Image since they offer a more reasonable price for home users.

 

I'm using ATI 2011 and so far its run flawlessly for me. It may be a little bloated and has a lot of features that i'll probably never use but its always been reliable for me and does the basics very well.

 

I'll have to add that i'm new to ATI 2011 and i will say it performs really good!
In fact it's already integrated as part of my permanent setup!
It has some goodies that comes in handy and it's very light.
Images and restores are smooth.

 

And, the "Try & Decide" which is a virtualization is a good addition to imaging. Reduces the need for re-imaging so often.

Best regards,

KOR!

 

Thankyou I will have to test it but 180MB for the installer & 80MB for the plus pack? Light?

 

The 180MB includes about 80MB for Linux Recovery Media. Most of imaging software programs package it separately.

You don't need the Plus Pack unless you want to build WinPE Recovery Media. If you want to do this, then you have download WIAK from Microsoft site, a download of about 1.7gb for x64 version.

Best regards,

KOR!

 

I consider the most important feature of plus pack to be universal restore. Therefore I would consider it mandatory for most.

 

I never could get Acronis to work for me.

I had version 9 (still do) but it would repeatedly Lock up during the initial phase of the backup process.
I was told it was a known issue involving a missing driver and that it was a common occurrence when using a wireless keyboard.

There was/is a workaround but I considered the process way too convoluted for my taste and along with the relatively high volume of negative posts here as well in some other forums, I'm gun-shy of Acronis.

Using the same computer with the same wireless keyboard, I've successfully imaged the hard drive via Macrium (free), Paragon 9, Paragon 10, DriveImage XML, Clonezilla, Redo B&R, and Active@ Disk Image, so I am totally convinced that the problem lies with Acronis, not my computer or the user.

They may have improved the application, but it's too late to make me a convert. I'll stick with what I know works for me.

 

Just bought Acronis TI Home 2011. Tried it and all is well. I have to admit that surprised me. I'm really interested in the try & decide feature because I try so much software. Tired of doing so many restores.

Plus you can convert a windows image into an acronis image as well as an acronis image into a windows image. Imaging and restore speeds were pretty good.

 

With light i meant that it does not uses a lot system resources
It has currently in my computer, 4 running processes (Which might look like a lot) Totaling ram usage of around 5MB, and 0 disk activity and 0 CPU activity

Easy as pie to create recovery media just in case PC won't boot. (DVD, USB and many others)

It opens fast, backups have been smooth, and i tried the "Try & Decide" feature with bitdefender, it was a good experience

 

What is the try & decide feature? Is it a VM or Snapshot application? I have not installed ATI 2011 yet?

 

I believe it is VM and I just tried it and it worked nicely. What I really like is how little disk space it uses compared to my previous software of FD-ISR. In their interface they show you how much space is used.

 

From the website.

The Try&Decide feature allows you to create a secure, controlled temporary workspace on your computer without requiring you to install special virtualization software. You can perform various system operations without worrying that you might damage your operating system, programs or data. After making virtual changes, you may apply them to your original system. If you make changes that you want to keep, you might want to commit those changes to the system. Among the operations you may attempt with this feature is to open mail attachments from unknown senders or visit websites that might contain potentially troublesome content.

 

Can you test software that requires a reboot? If not I will just keep using Shadow Defender for that.

 

Yes, however, at the time I tried Try & Decide (with early builds of ATI 2010 I think), it felt a bit clumsy. i.e. it caused a noticeable slowdown while running, high resource usage (not suitable for older computers), etc. I don't remember exactly what I disliked about it anymore, but I did prefer Shadow Defender when no reboots were required, and Rollback Rx was of course even better except it involved other disadvantages. I think Try & Decide is based on monitoring and backing up system changes in real time, which is a fundamentally different approach from lite virtualizers such as Shadow Defender and Returnil. I found it to be an excellent, unique and innovative feature of Acronis True Image, which I used frequently at the time until I got sick of it.

 

I did not run Try & Decide but, by your description, it seems to work similarly to GoBack (before it was broke down by symantec)! Is the GUI as advanced and granular in what you can monitor and recover, and almost to the nearest fraction of second?

 

I already used "Try & Decide" a few times already.
But i haven't checked the advanced settings.

 

From what I remember the GUI is very simple, you can specify which partitions to "protect" and where to save the changes (both C:\ by default). Once you turn Try&Decide on, the GUI will show you how long it has been running, how much free disk space it has consumed, and how much is still left. I think it redirects the ongoing changes to a real-time backup, so it should be similar to Shadow Defender or Returnil in time accuracy, but unlike those two (e.g. Shadow mode in Shadow Defender), the T&D mode uses lots of resources and disk space -- you will eventually run out of free disk space if you run it long enough.

When try&decide is running, you are not supposed to defrag protected partitions, run chkdsk or similar utilities, makes changes to partition sizes/layout, or run programs that would run outside of windows during a reboot (e.g. registry defrag). I never tried modifying the MBR while T&D was on, but I wouldn't recommend it. I have never used GoBack so I cannot compare T&D to it.

 

I'm wanting to use Rollback RX with Acronis True Image 11, but I tried it last week and was unable to restore my system with ATI while Rollback RX was installed. Has anyone else had a conflict with ATI, and Rollback RX?