ATI12/ATI2009 A giant step Backward

Well, at least in ATI12 Acronis finally fixed the problem where, in ATI11, during a resotre it improperly created a Generic Storage Volumne name, which generated errors when using the "Safely Remove Hardware" function in windows. And they've aded some new features that might work. And they've tried to hide the embarassingly silly "no sechedled backup" alert that was written in ATI11. YOu've go to give Acronis that much. But I would give $29 for an upgrade from any prior version. I would give 10 cents for an upgrade.

Get this,, when you do a restore from the ATI12/2009 CD, ATI doesn't show any volume labels. In prior versions, you could highlight any dirve on the list of drives to use for a restore-to location and you would see the volume lable -- this was critical since the boot cd doesn't assign the same drive letters as windows. With AT12/2009, you had better have already written down the serial numbers of your drives if have any that are the same make and size. And then know where you wrote them down when it comes time that you need to restore. This is the sort of rookie programming slop we found so often in ATI11 but hoped that ATI12/2009 would be free of. Forget what stuff ATI12/2009it can do, if you can't figure out which disk to restore to, what good is the program at all?

The interface is made to appear more Vista-ish by rearranging the locations of some commands ad putting on a new color scheme with diff fonts. Purely fashion. No worse no better than the prior interface designs -- you get used to any of them after a while.

Automated file management is compeletely removed from this version -- no more Backup location limits, no more auto-naming or autodeleting. The next few weeks will tell if this version works on more or less hardware than prior versions. But for basic functionality and the quality thereof, it's a giant step backward. This is step back to pre version 10 days when you had to use the secure zone of cobble some batch files to automatically uniquely name each backup and delete old ones before the disk became too full. We're supposed to go back to that?

 

Code:

Automated file management is compeletely removed from this version 

See my post here concerning backup locations.

 

I sure hope that's just a temporary oversight and that they will release an update that will again include full volume labels. In ATI11 I relied on my volume labels to correctly identify my drives.

Wow, that's disappointing. That was one of the truly useful features of ATI11. I could set the maximum number of backups I wanted to preserve, or maximum total size of backups, etc., and it always worked well for me in XP and Vista.
(comments repeated here in hopes that ATI staff read them and take action to revise ATI12/ATI2009.)

[Mustand: saw your comment, thanks, but most users want friendly functionality in ATI and don't want to have to use a third-party tool to obtain them.]

 

I am in total agreement with shieber and tuttle.

I trialed the Beta version some weeks ago; the elimination of Backup Locations prompted an email to Acronis pretty much begging for a change, using the exact words “giant step backward”, and then a quick restore to Version 10. I haven’t tried the final release and won’t, based on shieber’s post.

What a big “gosh darn”.

regards, CatFan

 

That plus the restore problem with disk identification and I had enough. I restored my disk using ATI10 and submitted for a refund. I thought about installing ATI12 on another machine to test out more of the package but, who needs this kind of stuff?

 

I'm sorry, but when you say that "Automated file management is completely removed from this version", do you actually mean that they took out the ability for the software to manage how many backups you run and save before it deletes them and starts a new set (backup location rules)? Is that what that means? I only ask, because it's not like that little feature worked all that great in ATI11.

The only logical thing to do in order to address it is just to remove it all together? That'll fix it! Comical! I regret the decision to buy ATI11 more and more every day! First, and last Acronis product purchase for me.

 

They substituted a somewhat different feature, which provides for automatic consolidation of incs/diffs/ into fulls and then deletes fulls. This feature works bsed on parametrs set when creating a task as opposed to creating limits when creating a Backup Location as in versions 10 and 11. Consolidation is a slow process. And if you want to do just fulls, yo can't make a task to do that, each successive backup overwrites the prior backup so you cannot have a history/series of full backups. That was enough for me to decide to skip the product. The wonky thing with identifying drives when restoring a full disk, and the problem some folks have reported with losing USB devices only make matters worse imo for ATI12/2009. IF you're thinkig fo buying, at least use the free trial and see what it does for you, or wait until some of the dust settles on the current release -- although ATI11 went essentially unfixed for the full year of its release -- one update that touched vey few of ATI11's probs.

 

No, I'm passing on it. Thanks for the info.

 

Terrible!

I wish I read this post before I uninstalled T11 and replaced it with IT 2009.

My previous strategy was 1 full backup and 6 diffs.
I need to be able to go back at least 30 days in case I make a mistake to get an older file back.

I guess the only way to have historical data similar to beofre is to have 30 diffs and then one consolidation a month?