Gift horse or Trojan horse?

The German magazine Chip, April 2006 issue, came with a CD including a free version of Acronis True Image Version 7.0, and also Disk Director.

I installed True Image 7.0 and registered it with Acronis. I got an email back saying that no technical support was available for this free version, but referring to this forum.

I installed Acronis on my drive C. I should add that I use a hard disk partitioned as drives C,D,E and F. G is a virtual CD, H a USB stick. K,L,M are partitions on an external (USB ) drive, L another USB stick, Y a DVD drive and Z a CD drive.

I made a backup of drive C, which includes WINDOWS and PROGRAMMES, to drive K on the external drive.

A few days later I attempted to restore it. After much churning and "analysing" drive C, Acronis told me it was in use. This was hardly surprising, given that this was where True Image was installed! But I could not restore from it.TI suggested a restart. After the restart Acronis presented a list of drives to restore from. This list was a nonsense. Though it correctly listed the hard disk in the pc, Acronis listed drives I-M as CD drives, and failed to identify the external hard disk, or the two CD/DVD drives. I could not access the backup file on drive K, or anywhere else for that matter.

I switched off, and copied this file to drive D on my internal hard drive. Of course, backing up to the same physical hard drive is not a recommended procedure. But Acronis left me no choice. This copying process took several hours.

After this, I started Acronis once more. Same result as before. Drive C was in use. So I restarted, and this time was able to restore the backup --- from Drive D.

In an experiment later, I started Acronis from a rescue CD I had made, but found the list of drives presented was as defective as before.

Can anyone suggest reasons and remedies for this behaviour? I have little incentive on the basis of my experience with True Image to date to pay real money for a later version. Okay, it was a gift horse, but it cost me a lot of time and effort, and if it is a Trojan horse to try and persuade me to buy a later version, it has woefully failed to achieve its purpose.

 

You should deal with nothing but the latest and gratest, i.e. V9 build 2337.

Anything else is a waste of time (=money).

Take the free V7 and upgrade to V9 for 29€. I did so (I'm also a Chip-Reader), I considered that a bargain.

Greetings from Mainz
Joachim

 

Hi translator,

Whatever version of TI you will be using, you must create the Rescue CD. If your main drive breaks down, you won't be able to restore it's image to a new drive without the Rescue CD.

I was using version 7 until six months ago. The reason I upgraded to version 9 was that TI7 Rescue CD wouldn't recognize my external USB disk. If you have no problems with external drives (from rescue environment) and you only need disk backup/restore, ver.7 may well be all you need.

But again, the small price you will pay for upgrading to TI9 will get you Acronis' support and I think it's worth it.


Addendum: If you upgrade, don't loose the TI7 serial number. You will need it to install the new version, along with the new S/N.

 

Hello translator,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that Acronis True Image 7.0 is the outdated version and we do not develop updates for it anymore.

Please download Acronis True Image 9.0 Home trial version at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/ in order to check how the product works.

You can find the detailed information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 in the respective User's Guide.

As it was said above, you can visit Acronis online store and purchase Acronis True Image 9.0 Home Upgrade.

Please note that if you restore a system partition or boot your computer from Acronis bootable rescue CD, Acronis True Image boots your computer into Linux environment. Linux can display drive letters different from those you see in Windows because Linux has its own rules of drive naming. This is absolutely normal and there is no need to worry about the difference in drive letters assignment.

For more information, please refer to the Malta Linux Users Group article here: http://linux.org.mt/article/partnames

Thank you.
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Tatyana Tsyngaeva