Why Should I buy this Acronis TI product

The experts here and elsewhere have been telling me this product is the greatest thing since sliced bread was invented.

Some even suggest it is so good I may be able to use it as my total DR and backup system.

BUT, when I come in to this forum, I see 12,000 plus posts/threads on it.

Scanning down the first dozen or so posts I see a wish list including fundamental issues such as no verification of bits copying, poor or non existant support, people trying to get support here that should come from vendor, bugs, major freezes, advice saying you must have had a USB plugged in thus causing TI10 to fail, change you drive letters that will fix it the list is endless.

Don't use TI10 the latest and greatest....

Why would anybody even consider this product? I don't get it?

What are the alternative products for this thing, maybe they have a better record.

Convince me to lay out money for this product!!!

 

I'm not here to get you to layout money for anything. However you might like to know that the forum is very open indeed. To their credit Acronis seem to welcome this.

My own impression is that issues arise for just two reasons.

1) Linux drivers tend to lag the bleeding edge hardare.
2) Acronis are under-invested in support resources.

The bottom line here is that after 6 months or so of a version of ATI being released it is among the best(if not the best) out there. The only worrying thing is that they release a new version every 12 months.

Don't get me wrong, if I believed there was a better product out there I wouldn't even be participating in this forum.

You need to make your own decision.

F.

 

You will find that when Acronis TI works, it does great. But as stated, it is hardware dependent - use the trial program for the full 15 days and decide. Also, many don't understand how it is to be used and the expectation is different than what it is capable of. You may have noticed threads to only back up the registry to be restored at some future date or backup one installed program to transfer to another PC with an OS already installed. It doesn't do those independently so it is a poor choice for those looking for those features.

Try the trial, read the user manual compared to what you want to do - it's the only way you can make the judgment yourself. When you have questions ask here and many can help. Then decide on the purchase.

 

Thanks, I will make a decision once more posts and information are available.

Are you saying they do a Bill Gates, release a version early and rely on you and I to find their bugs? It 's a good thing they only release every 12 months, at least you have a solid product then for 50% of the time.

I wonder how many of you TI people would buy this product again knowing what you know now?

 

"You will find that when Acronis TI works, it does great"

when it works?

 

Well, I've used it for a while (since ver. 7). In that time, I've only personally experienced one problem with backup to an external USB drive, which a challenge/replace experiment traced to be dependent on the choice of USB hub used. Not sure who was at fault here (hardware vendor or Acronis). Aside from that, no problems. It does seem that when hardware changes, a wave of issues emerge (SATA drives would be the current whipping boy).

In general, I try to stay a bit back from the initial releases of a version. Used V8 until fairly recently even though I upgraded to V9 in Jan (the discount was too great to skip at the time).

It works for everything I've used it for with no problems. As for whether you should buy it..., try it and make your own call on that since hardware details matter.

Blue

 

Thanks Blue, good advice.

Do you think a product like this should be so sensitive to harware variations?

What about support from them when you hit the snag? Sounds as if you never did get an answer from them and had to solve it on your own?

 

I also am not posting trying to convince you to buy or not, but I can tell you that in all my years in IT and having tried a few different imaging products in quite a few different scenarios, Acronis TI has impressed me more than any other. Overall you have to keep in mind that with any software program you will never find one completely bug free. When you think about something as complex as an imaging program is, it is even more likely there will be a few bugs. Now TI in my experience as others here, is not bug free but is definately without question a quality product that for the most part does what it does better than the others out there. It is popular for a reason and that is it can do a really good job fairly easy.

Another thing to consider is that Acronis puts out a new version every year. With each new version the bugs discovered are discussed here and there are many talented and helpful people on this forum that always try to help out. This is another benefit, having a place to go for info in addition to Acronis themselves. This being a support forum you will see alot of posts talking about various issues but it is because it is a support forum and not that the product is not good. With the endless hardware and software configurations that users have out there running Acronis, it is sometimes funny just how few critical issues there really are. Most of the bugs in the last few versions of TI have IMO been primarily annoyances and not show stoppers or anything. Acronis stays active in trying to resolve the issues and puts out updates to download quite often. Recent complaints in reference to this have mostly been that towards the end when a new version upgrade is released, they won't support further previous version updates. This however is a pretty typical practice in the software industry in general. Another cool think about Acronis which I personally feel is of value is the fact that they keep all of your products online in your account along with your ser#s that you can log in and download whenever and wherever you might be with an Internet connection. There is no product activation scheme like scamantec has, and they do have pretty fair pricing in comparison to some of the other imaging products on the market. All in all, my experience with Acronis and TI has been far better than most of the other software products I have used.

For what it is worth, I highly recommend Acronis TI over any other image product that I have tried and I would say that you can take advantage of their trial version first to play around with before you buy to make sure it runs well on your system. Anyway, for the cost, what it can do for you and the features it has, you really can't go wrong. Good luck with your decision and give the trial a try for yourself.

 

I just purchased TI 10, installed it, it works for me. Did I do my homework? Yes, I tried every backup program I could find that had free trials. A couple of them would not even install on any of my computers without abends. Most, other than Acronis TI home, were clunky or were difficult to do restores.

Does TI 10 have it's quarks? Yes a few, but I'm happy so far. Personally, I'm glad that so many great people are here to help me through the fog.

 

Thanks, Ed you are right of course to test drive the car before buying it. Like me you must have a few years on you to say that!

Just out of curiousity:
what other products did you try?
IF you did not have TI version ? what would you have to do to achieve what you achieve with it... sorry poorly phrased..

 

I've never had a problem getting promp support, although the fastest way to get good help is right here on this forum.

sh

 

Are you saying you get NOT good support from vendor? Thus relying on this forum?

 

Your welcome and also quite right about having a few years on me having been in the IT field since the mid 1980s.

Well as far as the other products I have tried there were a few of the popular ones like Ghost, drive image and backupmypc. I also tried quite a few early ones back when Ghost first came out be can't even recall their names now, they obviously didn't last too long but I think one was made by Western Digital along time ago.

I think the only other one I used very much with any consistency in results was Ghost. Overall it would work successfully I would say about 60% of the time for me. This is in many of the older versions and they two newer versions I have used were Ghost 9 and the new Save & Restore which essentially is Ghost 11 with a scaled down user interface. Ghost 9 seemed to work much better than the previous versions but still had quirks some of the time and did not offer all the features TI does. I ended up getting rid of it after a few months because of quirks it had and scamantec is terrible for support info. I then moved to Acronis TI8 at the time and was amazed that it worked much quicker, was easier to use and never once failed to image a drive successfullly for me. I was so impressed I began to use it solely for all my imaging needs. I then at work purchased the TI8 Enterprise Server version for my servers and again was very impressed with how well it worked for our complex server configurations. Another great thing is the ability to resize the partitions of the target drive when starting the image process. I have to say I really think TI is a great product. I then later on upgraded to the ver 9, which had a few quirks compared to 8 but also more features and still would give me a high success rate compared to Ghost. A few nights ago I purchased to upgrade to ver 10 and so far am really impressed with it. Now I have not done a whole lot thus far other than a few images and verifications but it is working really smooth on my system. I do hear there are a few quirks with the Outlook mail backups and there is one where creating a rescue cd in your burner, it has to be put in the tray and left open before pushing the button in the program to creat it, or it will give you a drive busy error. The solution to it is to just leave the cd burner tray open then push the button which will then auto close the drive for you and successfully burn the rescue disk. I will be trying some of the other features as time permits but so far I am happy and it is a first release so I know Acronis will have service updates over the next years time making it even better.

As with many different types of programs, when we find ones that just stand out in their category over the rest we tend to really appreciate them. To me Acronis TI is one of these programs. Now as I mentioned it is not perfect, but it is no slouch either and to answer you question if I did not have TI and had to use another method instead I would probably be trialing two other products which I have not personally used yet, Paragon Drive Copy 8 and the other is called Retrospect. These are two I have read quite a bit about with mostly favorable comments from those using them. So I would definately be testing them myself. One thing I can assure of is that I would not be using Ghost or Save & Restore at all. The backupmypc is not something I would recommend either from my experiences.

 

At the time I had my problem this forum didn't exist. E-mail support was OK, but basically marched through the basic testing/log scripts you see requested here. Sometimes that works, sometimes you have to be in front of the hardware. They came to a deadend with me, but I had a viable workaround from the start via a second hard drive which I could use as an intermediate storage location until the archive was relocated to the external drive, so I didn't press for a solution since I always try to focus on the end result, not how I get there. I basically stumbled on the hub connection later (it was a reproducible problem) when I switched it out for other reasons.

Blue

 

That's the wrong conclusion to draw from what I said. The last time I asked for support, I got a response the same day. I'm saying there's nothing like an avid user community that includes a large number of folks willing to help out others.

There are many more people on this forum than the company could possibly have on a support staff (I mean a real support staff and not just some professional "Help" firm that reads from a script like many other companies use) and you can often get answers very quickly just by posting on the forum. I think that is generally true of support forums. But perhaps the biggest price a company pays for such forums is having to bear all the negative stuff such forums present.

 

Ed:

Thanks for such a complete answer. Our generation knew how to work.

I've got an old version 6 of Retrospect which came with my maxtor external drive, where I backup files etc. Also keep my photos on it.

Retrospect 6 came from Dantz orginally, French I think. Quite powerful on backing up files and whole drives. BUT it lost the one button update feature almost as soon as I got it and their support vanished.

I think they got bought out by EMC.

It used to be able to create a bootable recovery cd for me but it as upgrades came for XP sp1 to sp2 , and other software it got more and more crippled.

It is very expensive and not strong on recovery of specific files.

If TI is as good as everyone says I hope to replace my old Retrospect with it.

Hope this helps

PS: I will check out Paragon Drive Copy 8 to compare with TI9/10.

 

No problem, it would be cool to know what your thoughts are as well once you have trialed them. BTW... I have a few coupon codes around that are good till Nov 1st for Paragon with 35% off their normal price. There is also a small 10% off trick at the Acronis store you can use by hitting the back button on your browser once you have added TI to your cart. A popup will appear offering you 10% off your cart. Keep in mind you need IE and allow popups for Acronis site to work.

If you want any of this info just PM me and I will give you the codes.

 

Sheiber is right about this Forum. There are A LOT of Great folks on here that can help solve just about any problem with Acronis.
As they spend their Free time helping, passing along their experiences, and knowledge of the program, threads grow very technical with long detailed steps in solving the problems.
That's just it though. When problems ARE reported, and threads grow very long ... you expect to see the problems solved eventually.

The problem people have with Acronis is that there are existing versions "Hanging" with NO fix. Users here have reported problems with TI 9.0 (build 3677) for a long time. Does Acronis fix them? Nope. Instead, they release TI 10.0 that you have to buy. This is the MAIN thing that has many people.... pissed off! It's absolutly essential that you take care of existing problems ...BEFORE putting out "Upgrades". You just don't leave these problems "Hanging" with v9.0 users,... and move on with v10.0, and expect users to Pay.

I for one have used Acronis since May. But however, used another product for many years before switching to Acronis. Is ATI a good product? Yes! It has the potential of being the Best on the market. But there is one fundamental thing they're forgetting. That's the business side of it! They're forgetting the People who helped them up the business ladder.
But as they say in the business world, ..."It's harder staying at the top, than it is getting there!".

 

Ed:

is this it? their propaganda pagew offers hardware flexibility counter to TI?

hmmmm

Paragon Software

Paragon Drive Copy is a cutting-edge solution to deploy new hard drive, migrate data and applications online, and create bootable backup copy of a hard drive or its partitions. Paragon Drive Copy is based on innovative Hot Copy technology. Due to this technology all your applications remain online during data migration without significant performance delays. Easy to manage and understand interface in Windows XP style, unique One Button Copy Wizard, platform independent Drive Copy CD, automatic transferred partition resizing, wide hardware support (including USB, FireWire hard drives) make Drive Copy an ideal solution for the full spectrum of disk cloning operations.

 

Actually I was looking at Drive Backup 8 http://www.drive-backup.com/home/personal/ Sorry, I accidentily wrote drive copy in my reply.

The other one seems to be primarily a drive copying utility more than the fuller featured one. There is also a corp version but it seems expensive at $99.99.

 

Thanks Ed, I have the detailed specs now on Drive Backup 8 in an excel spread sheet, quite a list and very impressive. I'm going for the trial so I can verify their claims in the specs, you trust but verify ...

What I want to do is get the same list for Acronis TI and cross compare them items by item. This is a lot of work, which doesn't worry me BUT I'm thinking after I merge the 2 lists I may not be the best person here to fill in the yes, no's Good, Poor accessments.

Any ideas on how you want me to contibute on this ? who's in and who's out?

I'm ignoring price as a variable for now.

 

Hi Sheiber:

I thought so, but you clarified, thanks, I don't mind exposing my assumptions to check them! I'm glad you get fast support, a major plus for me.

Thanks, I see your point about the negative image an active forum like this one exposes a vendor to, good point. I admire Acronis then for that.

Some vendors hide.

 

"Greatest thing since sliced bread" has been officially banned by the International Cliché Commission. "Latest and greatest" also is under consideration, but for now at least you still may use it.

Plainly the program has lots of faults, but it appears to be the best of its kind that is available right now. The alternative is...nothing. So maybe that's why your $ would not be misspent.

 

I second to the success stories of ATI. I constantly use it to run backups on virtual development machines and have without any trouble virtualized my physical machine with universal restore.

The performance when using good media (ie local hard disk) is really astonishing; it runs backup of my 60 gigabytes of development machine data within 20 mins and verifies it with another 20, totaling 40 minutes of backing up 60 gigabytes of data (compressed it makes it around 40 gigabytes).


The server backup and corporate workstation (not sure about the home edition really, haven't used that one much) also allow making automatic emails about operations including full operation log.


For workstation backup, I just only recently discovered very super feature that exists in scheduling features (again not sure about home edition); ATI can be scheduled to run at system shutdown.

So for now, my entire dev environment with everything in it runs within 40 minutes (including verify) daily whenever I finish working and shutdown the comp. After ATI is done with the backup, the computer shuts down normally.

In my environment I have two internal SATA disks to get the safety against HD crash and the performance.

 

Hi all:

There may be an alternative, Drive Backup 8. I've downloaded a 30 day trial version today and will give it a workout against it's own specifications.

Later on after the 30 day trial will do the same thing with Acronis TI veresion ?.

When complete will post results hereif anybody shows interest for all to see and no doubt comment on.

Any expereince + or - with Drive Backup 8?

I'm on windows xp sp 2 so that is an issue for me anyway.

One thing I noticed about DB 8 is it has some Linux support.

More later