is true image going the way of nero?

a quick story then a comment.

Over 5 years ago I was loving Nero for cd & dvd burning. The updates were fast (so new drives were supported) and the program was 13 meg (version 5). Then version 6 came out, a few more features, and grew to 33 megs.

Then version 7 came out and everything changed. Suddenly nero wanted to do everything for you. Slideshows, music mixes, even some voip telephony component. The download was now 150 meg and I made the mistake of buying it. Bloated, slow, and I only wanted it to do one thing: burn dvd's and cd's. So I stopped buying it and don't use it any longer. I found imgburn, a free burning program that is 1.5 meg and works great!

True image seems to have grown over the past few years...they're adding tons of features, but many problems still seem to go unfixed. I don't know the size of version 11, but my version 8 was 25 meg and version 9 was 88 megs. Are they just heaping new stuff on top of a faulty foundation? Someone help me out, how big is version 11?

Acronis, please consider keeping the program tight and doing what it did/does well: image and restore hard drives. I did like the ability to do incremental backups that you introduced a while ago. Other than that, spend time making sure it works great on all current hardware.

Just a thought.

Sean

 

The download for v11 at Betanews is about ~136MB.

If its any comfort, Nero is far worse than ATI. Nero 8 is bigger than a CD.

 

OMG - Bloatware

 

Somewhat of a rehash of what I posted on another thread but I don't know of who in the commercial software business would say reducing the feature set in a product will sell more copies. If you are giving it away like your example then probably fewer features is a good idea.

Interestingly, I am a person that only does manual, basic full images but I don't care if the other stuff is there just in case I want it someday. I've got more disk space than enough and it doesn't cost anything twirling around just waiting for me. Also, the users keep asking for more features such as merging archives and file exclusions in image backups. However, I agree that getting the hardware support sorted out should be top priority.

Now you might argue about the usefulness but the larger size of TI9 is due in part to the BartPE plugin being included in the download (V8 required you to get it separately), 32 and 64 bit Windows support, differential backups and Files and Folders backup. Even though I don't use most of the above, I wouldn't say they are frivolous stuff to include in a backup program.

I too bought Nero only to burn CDs. I trimmed down the installation to what I thought I want. Interestingly, I now use it to create DVDs which was far from my intentions when I bought it.

I know a lot of people will disagree with me on my view but I just want a comfortable computing experience - I have no intention of going back to the days of doing DOS memory management to shoe-horn apps into 640K, sweating over free-space on my 10M hard-drive, etc. When I want to ride around in a no-frills desktop environment I'll probably go to Linux. In the meantime, I'm not going to get wound up on some extraneous application features.

 

Funny you should say that ... I too have stayed with Nero ver 6.

 

I couldn't agree more. Nero is the best example how to ruin a good program. I used to love nero, but now i don't even want it on my computer. Maybe i could live with the download of several hundred mb if i had the option to chose what to install. The least thing they could do is the option to install only nero burning rom, but there is no way to not install nero scout, the nero toolbar (talking about the toolbar available in the taskbar) and a stupid indexing service. I found ways to remove nero scout and the toolbar, but found other burning apps that is less then 10mb to do the job just as good as nero.
There are several other examples like text editor that suddenly contain a crappy ftp, ssh and telnet client. It seems like they run out of ideas and have to include something to sell a new version.
Another thing i dislike is when i only want to make manual backup then why is 3 new processes running even the application isn't. When i close TI i don't want any processes left running since i only create backups manually.