Hope Acronis Sticks to Knitting

I am a bit worried that Acronis is trying to do too much with TI. Zonelabs started to bloat Zonealarm and started having problems.

I am happy with a partition/drive backup programme that easily does drive images, restores from a boot CD without Windows, has a BartPE plugin and saves to a variety of destinations (USB drive being preferred). I am very happy with autoverify in TI9.

They are now adding a file/folder backup that creates another type of tib file with requests that it be mountable and an ability to explore, read and extract files from an explorer tree. There are quite a few standalone folder/file backup programmes. I use the free Karen's Replicator which does an excellent job and can be scheduled to back up critical folders.

Acronis should keep refining the basic functions rather than adding stuff like file/folder backup first. That way leads madness

 

I really like TI and have used it since V1.0 three years ago. However I must admit that I think I agree with you. Acronis are on a marketing mission and are trying to cram "niceifs" into what was becoming one of the industry leaders.

In mechanical engineering it is a well established rule that the more moving parts a device has, the more expensive it is to manufacture, and the more liable to failures/faults it is. Software engineering shares much of this philosophy. The real art to a succesful product (imho) is to keep it simple. This immediately beings two benefits. 1). Potential and existing users have a clear idea of exactly what the product is meant to do, and can learn how to use it easily; 2) The chances of it breaking are greatly reduced.

To be fair to Acronis, I think their software is of a much higher quality than many others on this forum suggest. Many of the perceived problems are to do with trying to support a hardware base which is wide and which changes every day. However, once they start "adding" extra tools into TI I think they will start encountering a different class of reliability problem.

One more thing while I am ranting away, why oh why does Acronis use the same file extension for both Image and File backups? Answers on a postcard please....

 

I also tend to agree. Herewith a quote from a post I made nearly six months ago:

Seems my comments fell on deaf ears!!

Regards

 

That was kind of spooky.

 

IMHO I am very disappointed with the file backup feature. No one asked for this and if I want to backup individual files I will use other software design specifically for that task. The Acronis people completely misunderstood what many of us had asked for!

What I (and many others asked for) was the ability to EXCLUDE certain files from a hard disk image backup. For instance swap files, virtual partition files, temporary files, etc... are completely unnecessary to include in a imaged backup and wastes a lot of space. Version 9 still doesn't allow excludes on an image backup! I have created 7gb Acronis backups where all I really needed was the OS related files... with file exclusions, that image would have fit on 1 DVD SL!

This is not a difficult challenge or request considering the very first version of Ghost had this ability (way before it was purchased by Symantec). The only reason why I explored Acronis is because Ghost (at the time) did not support backups from within Windows. This is no longer the case!

Shawn

 

At first I thought the file/folder backup sounded like a good addition but since it can't be mounted I think the file extension should be different. From Windows Explorer True Image should automatically offer to plug-in images of partitions and for those of files/folders it should automatically bring up the restore dialogue.

In practise I've found the file/folder backup less useful than I thought it would be.

CaH

 

I also agree. The file and folders backup option is essentially a big compressed file similar to a .zip or .rar archive of folders you choose to backup.

Seeing you can browse/selectively extract and open individual files in .rar archives from winRar, why would I want to use Acronis to do my file/folder backups?! Apart from the "differential" backup function that is.

Still, they have promised to add the ability to browse the image at a later stage. There are a couple of good ideas in the "wish-list" that I'd also like to see implemented in v.9 of acronis (after this buggy release I'm not likely to upgrade).

 

Totally happy with TI8 build 791 (which is the fastest in my system). I always wait for feedback before jumping on new versions of software, even moreso when it involves some major changes (or add-ons) as in this case. Newer doesn't necessarily mean better, and as long as TI8 serves my needs, I see no reason to go for TI9.

 

Agreed! The current 9.0 version is so pathetic that I'm ready to go back to DI 7 (Powequest. Pre-Symantec) It worked everytime without fail. TI gets slower and slower...buggier and buggier. I had to use a TI 8 .937 disk to fix .2259's failures. From now on I'll let the pioneers take the arrows while I restore with what works. Acronis TI 9.0 doesn't. Wish I hadn't up... I mean downgraded. No more money from me. Edit: 5 versions in a week without a fix says it all for us beta testers.

Get it right the first time!!!!!