True Image 11 - an honest appraisal!

As the title states – As some of you will know I have written various posts requesting information regarding True Image 11 over the past few days having been offered and received a free upgrade from True Image 10 due to long recovery times when using a USB external Hard Drive.

A number of you told me to leave well alone and stick with TI 10 due to well documented bugs with TI 11. Simply out of curiosity I have installed TI 11 on all three of my computers to see what the results were like.

My latest PC is an off the shelf HP Quad Core 6600, Asus Mobo with 3 gig of RAM and two WD Blue 500 gig SATA HD’s (one is simply a slave not RAID) NVidia graphics running Vista HP. My other PC is now 5 years old but with some upgrades – MSI mobo P4 3.0 processor, ATi graphics 1.5 gig of RAM two HD’s one 250 gig the other (slave) 160 gig both IDE again running Vista HP. The final one is a Dell Inspiron Laptop two years old with ATi card and 80 gig HD – again running Vista HP.

First off the newest HP PC – TI 11 installed without problems and backed up without any issues though don’t know why I get the yellow warning bar about no scheduled backups when I had scheduled one? However, the recovery was more problematic. When selecting recovery from within Windows and using my USB drive as source file i.e. not from the rescue boot disk, the Acronis Loader started up but there was no information displayed in the box about what drives were being backed up and from where. About 30 seconds later the PC reboots and goes back to Windows Desktop. I can only perform a recovery from the rescue boot disk when using USB as source. The same happened when I tried using the slave drive as source for the recovery file.

The actual recovery did work and the recovery times were an improvement on TI 10 (approx 3 hours from USB and just over an hour from the slave drive) this took 17 hours in TI 10 for an 80 gig file. However, the progress bar has me baffled, the two bars don’t synch properly and the times are all over the place – e.g. both bars reading identical 18 minutes remaining, then the top bar starts creeping in front of total progress bar and the time goes up as each segment moves forward on top bar – e.g. top bar now four segments in front of total progress bar and time now increased from 18 minutes to 1hour 5 minutes. Bottom progress bar then jumps four segments and catches up, time now remaining shows 9 minutes, what on earth is going on there? Finally restore completes successfully the machine reboots and system is up and running again. However, and MudCrab please note – I dual boot with Vista and Linux and the restore has wiped away the dual boot record – I had a right faff putting that one right (I said MudCrab please note as he indicated that TI 11 was more reliable with dual booting with Vista).

On my older PC TI 11 backed up and recovered without incident – the only problem being that the total progress bar and operation in progress % figure remain blank throughout so the user has no way of knowing how long the backups take.

I haven’t even tried to backup or recover on the Dell as the TI 11 GUI seems very flaky indeed, struggling to analyse or lock the drive.

In summing up I’m shocked and appalled that this particular version of True Image has ever been released. I am told that the latest build (which is the one I have) is much improved over the previous builds, so god only knows how bad they were.

MudCrab, Mustang – I did finally get the VistaPE disk to work with TI 11 but had to build it no less than three times before it worked and even then it did seem to load very slowly?

I have now reinstalled the trusty TI 10 on all three of my PC’s. It may be slow when recovering from a USB drive (and even that isn’t an issue now I have my VistaPE disk) but at least it is very stable and very reliable.

Acronis – you are better than this, True Image 11 is not your finest hour.

 

The progress bars have not worked correctly for a long time (if ever). Those are the types of problems I consider easy to fix and don't understand why they remain build after build.

TI 11 will modify the BCD file and allow Vista to boot correctly in most cases when the partition is moved (as in a restore). TI 10 would not do this and you would have to use the Vista DVD to repair the system. Because a lot of people don't receive a Vista DVD with their computers, this was a big problem.

Regarding Linux, depending on how you have GRUB installed, TI 11 can successfuly restore it to a booting state using the Sector-by-Sector restore. This is the only way I've found that works. Previous versions didn't have that feature and they all (TI 11 included) wipe the info during a "normal" restore.

VistaPE can be slow to load on some systems. That's part of the reason I still use my WinBuilder 072a/VistaPE 10 builds. They are much faster.

 

That was what I was faced with - the HP PC doesn't come with a disk, just a recovery partition.

I'll tell you what I did - I returned the PC back to factory settings, re-installed Acronis TI 10 then did a recovery from my most recent TI 10 full backup (four days old) using the VistaPE disk for TI 10. A bit long winded I know but everything was back to normal no errors dual booting restored in just over and hour - the whole exercise. I have Linux on the slave drive with half of the 500 gig reserved for backups and the rest are partitions for Linux

VistaPE is lightening fast with the TI 10 plugin - quite literally the Acronis application opens the very second I click on it, however, with TI 11 plugin the DVD was spinning for anything up to 30 seconds with egg time active, I kept thinking Acronis wasn't going to load. I also notice the file size was double that of the TI 10 build.

It really does amaze me that TI 10 can be so good - and yes with all three of my Vista machines (Linux drivers apart) and yet TI 11 is so poor.

 

Check if there is a folder named I386 on your HP. If there is, you can make your own Windows Installation cd from it. This would be the type of cd where you can do a repair installation (or a clean installation - without the crapware) and which will not require you to re load all your applications .... in case you ever find yourself in the situation requiring a Windows repair.

 

My installation of True Image 11 displays the same behavior as Faust's, but mine is in XP.
Does anyone know of a workaround/solution? Even if it's just a command to launch TI's non-Windows environment from within Windows.
IOW, I want the ability to restore the boot partition without having to use the boot disc. I could tape the boot disc to the the PC case, but that's rather inelegant.

TIA

 

Hello Faust and David Hook,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for delayed response.

Most likely, the issue is being caused by disks having different ID in Windows and Linux. Thus, they aren't found in Linux mode (after reboot) when using the restore script created in Windows (before reboot). Could you please check if the issue persists in the following scenario:
- Only the system hard drive is connected to the computer;
- The image is stored on a second partition (nonsystem).

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Thank you for the suggestion, Marat.

I am using an external USB HDD for backup storage and two internal HDD. All were connected.
After several failed attempts to repair the installation, including removal of everything associated to Acronis that I could find (even a hidden folder), I eventually restored a PowerQuest image I'd created prior to the Acronis installation and reinstalled True Image. I don't know why, but it now will launch, and complete, a restoration of the boot partition without using the boot disc. It retains the same hardware configuration. Anyway, all is now well.

BTW, does anyone know the location of the scheduling file(s)? After the partition restore, and restoring the backup of my Acronis settings, I had the previously-configured backup locations and tasks, but the tasks had no scheduling info. Not a biggie, but it would be nice to know.

Again, thank you for the reply.

 

If you mean the task files they have the extension tis are located

for ATI 10:
[system drive]\Documents and Settings\Allusers\Application Data\Acronis\Trueimage\Scripts

and


for ATI11:
[system drive]\Documents and Settings\Allusers\Application Data\Acronis\Trueimage\Scripts

You can call an ATI script by passing it as a parameter to Trueimageservice.exe. For example, on a set up where C: ist he system drive, the command would look like this:


Although the scriptfile name would be differ for each script file.
For ATI 11:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Acronis\TrueImageHome\TrueImageHomeService.exe" /script: "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Scripts\34FAB7F6-432D-464F-A1F1-5B9C3E608B71.tib.tis"

Backup Location info is stored inthe cfg file in the Backup Location.

 

Hello shieber.

My backup includes the "All Users\Application Data\Acronis" folders.
It also includes "My Username\Application Data\Acronis\Backup Scripts" (although it is empty), "Program Files\Acronis" and "Common Files\Acronis".
When I restored the boot partition, TI had no backup locations or tasks. After applying the backup of my Acronis settings, TI then had the tasks, but not the scheduling info. As I've said, it's not a biggie. I've since, manually reconfigured the schedule/tasks. I then created a new backup of the boot partition, from which I've taken the Acronis backup. My backup now has complete info., but it may not properly translate to an earlier image.
I may have to do this a few more times as my usage pattern stabilizes. Or, I may opt to do away with scheduling.

I appreciate the help.
Cheers.

 

Sorry for such a long delay in replying to your post, I have been away on business for a few days. There are lots of i386 files when I do a search. However, I have created a Window Vista startup repair CD using the WAIK installation - quite easy to do and it works, so this is yet another tool to use alongside my VistaPE disk I have given up on ATI 11 and put TI 10 back on my system. Much the more reliable application of the two. ATI 11 is simply spawn of the devil as far as I am concerned.

 

If you mean lots of files IN a folder named i386 then, yes, from those files you can make your own Windows installation cd. Search the Internet for directions to do that if you want a Windows installation cd.

 

I don't think you can make an installation CD quite the way it has been described to me in these posts with Vista. There isn't an I386 folder for a start, well not strictly true, I have 48 of them? However, even if they are the ones it's not just a case of copying them and that's it.

As I said I have made a repair CD form the WAIK which gives an option to repair or install Windows and looks just like the Vista install GUI - the repair works but I have no idea what happens if you click install Windows.