Disappointing trial

I had in mind to buy the Acronis True Image 8.0 so I downloaded the trial version and installed it a few days ago. And there is still 9 days of the trial to go. The installation went fine.

I have recently purchased an extra external harddisk, Hitachi Travel Star 60 Gb in a USB 2 case, fully compatible with the PC's USB 1 port.

My objective of buying a recovery program and an external harddisk is to save time if Windows or internal hdd accidently should fail again.

So I want to use the external harddisk for backups and recovery image files.
My OS is Windows 2000 Pro on a well functioning PC, 1 GHz AMD Athlon, 512 Mb RAM, 40 Gb hdd with 3 partitions.

With use of the Windows Disk Manager I have made 2 primary partitions and 2 logical drives on an extended partition on the external harddisk.
All volumes on the harddisk has been checked and are fully functional with other applications for example the Windows Backup utility.
The volumes on the external HDD are all at least 2 times larger than the collection of files to create an image of.

I tried to make an image of my Cartition with the OS and programs. But the ATI 8.0 would not create an image file on any of the four volumes on the external hdd.
Two times I got the message: 'Failed to write data to the archive file. A possible reason might be poor media quality.'
Two times the dialog Commit Pending Operations hung saying 'Preparing for image creation...'
At subsequent tests nothing happened at all in the dialog box.
Acronis does not warn about limitations of this kind on their site.

The web site and GUI looks promising but the tool behind apparently does not fulfil the promises.

Before I decide to buy the ATI 8.0 I must be absolutely sure that it can function properly together with the external drive and any other drive.

Some comments in this forum indicate that Acronis has released version 8.0 too early. Is that true?
Is it possible to download a version 7.0 trial?

Do any of you have experiences with better not time consuming alternatives?

Kind regards
Keltex

 

Hi,

Sorry to hear you are not happy with the trial.

I am using just about the same setup with the same external and OS with no problems.

I have a couple of questions. Why did you partition the external? Is it formated as NTFS?

Mine is a single NTFS partition and it works great. There is more than enough room for other files with the image on it.

Let us know if you try this setup and if it works for you.

Mike

 

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"Why did you partition the external?"

Can't believe the reponse on this. What differnece does it make why they partitioned the external? Some external drives are now 400GB, why would you NOT partition? It's nobody's business WHY they partitioned their external drive. 1) Easier and smaller image files, 2) faster defragging, 3) because they wanted to. All of those are acceptable. Are you official Acronis support? I can't believe you would ask such a question.

 

Hi there,

Please try not to be so aggresive - you could have made your point much more politely. Remember this forum is open to newbies as well as old hands.

Regards

 

I agree that the comments were uncalled for. But at the same time, I would expect most users to take comments from a guest user with a grain of salt anyway.

 

Hi there Wdormann,

Right on! as always. Do you, a I do, ever wonder why so many guest posters seem never to log their proplems with support@acronis.com in the first instance? Could it be that they're using unregistered versions of Acronis software? Surely not

Kind regards

 

Hi
Thanks for the response.

All my partitions, internal and external, are formatted as NTFS.
ATI 8.0 recognizes all the external partitions as valid drives. So I have prefered to save the image files on a separate partition on the external hdd.

I have made some more tests with the ATI 8.0 trial.
On my system I have tried to make images of the primary active Cartition and images of a relatively small logical drive on a extended partion on the PC's internal hdd.

My conclusion:

I can make images of the logical drive and save it on the external USB hdd.
This kind of image I can access and explore as a virtual drive. I can even copy and extract files from the virtual drive.
For a test purpose it is impossible to restore this image on an other partition of the external drive (no surprise and the USB 1 connection to and from the hdd is very slow for this kind of operation).
However I restored this image from the external hdd to the internal drive's original position succesfully the first time without problems.

BUT
Several attempts have made it clear that it is impossible to create an image of my primary Cartition (with the OS and applications).
And this kind of image is the goal for the whole struggle.

Now I give it up.
The program seems to be fragile and unpredictable. The operation of this program is too expensive counted in work hours.
My one-man-small-business is turning in to a half-man-micro-business.

I will wait and pass by the Acronis site later on to see if they have made an update that can work on my system. I might then give it a chance.

Regards
Keltex

 

Hello Keltex --

I believe that the problem lies in some compatibility with the software that is running on your computer and somehow prevents Acronis True Image 8.0 from taking the image of your system partition. Please can you send a request to support@acronis.com supplying Sysinfo file along with the Acronis True Image 8.0 log file so that we can investigate the problem?

Thank you.