Why upgrade if you already own True Image?

As the title says - apart from having something new or the psychological value of keeping up with the the latest and greatest is there any point in upgrading every year to the latest version of True Image?

Take myself as an example - I have TI 10 and with VistaPE the product backs up and restores without problems (bare in mind this is what I bought the product for). I also have TI 11 and again used with VistaPE it works every time - it will even work without VistaPE though does take about 3 hours to do a recovery. TI 11 has worked much better since I did a complete sweep of my PC to remove any remnants of previous versions before I installed it.

This brings me round to TI 2009 - having tried this on a trial basis it has worked on my PC the best of any TI product to date - very fast backups and equally fast recoveries and no need for VistaPE either.

So that's three products all basically doing the same job and all doing it competently - two of them I already own, so what would be the point of upgrading? I'm sure I'm not the only one in this position either?

 

You're right, there is no real, hard reason for you to upgrade. A lot of us are in the same boat but upgrade just to see what the new one looks like, how it works, .... . We also think we might buy a new PC and then we might really need it but that is usually just rationalizing. I have only upgraded one license to TI2009 and will probably leave it at that.

One thing though, having a version that didn't need a VistaPE CD to boot would be plus for the way I use TI. I frequently make images of my PC before I test things so I like to start the restore (to put things back to their original state) in Windows and let the PC reboot rather than get out the VistaPE CD. A minor point, I agree.

 

take a look at the changelog/new features
if you need any of it then upgrade, if you dont then uhhm... dont

 

If what you have now works, and you aren't seriously into trying to answer questions here from others, then upgrading is completely pointless imo.

Put VistaPE on a flash drive, or even better onto its own bootable partition. You then not only get into it very quickly, but also have available A43 file management and any other facilities you have incorporated in your PE build, such as DD. This is a lot better than just having a bootable ATI disk whatever the version.

 

TI2009 is riddled with so many issues at this point. I would NOT upgrade. I am awaiting a refund for 2009 and will be moving back to TI10, which was very reliable.

my 2 cents

Bob

 

You say that but on my PC's especially the QuadCore I couldn't detect any faults - it even worked on my 4 year old P4. The only fault I could find was the time bar said recovery would take 44 minutes but was completed in 22 minutes. I know one or two have complained that Office 2007 was corrupted on recovery though again I have Office 2007 and it worked without fault. The problems seem so hardware dependant. I know lots of people can use ATI 10 to perform quick recoveries from an external hard drive even with Vista but mine took 17 hours before I had the VistaPE disk. I think at the end of the day you have to go with what works for you - though I now have three versions that will work for me.

P.S. even the traffic light warnings are now working for me with TI 11

 

I chatted quite a bit with Customer Support today. They CAN reproduce the MS Office issue...on their machines. Not sure if it is hardware dependent or what. I have a Quad Core 2.66 GHZ with 4 GB of Ram and Vista 64 Bit. TI10, nor TI11 has the Office issue....only 2009. Acronis is aware of it and is working on a solution. Frankly....this software was NOT ready for prime time...

 

I can't argue with how you have found if for you and note your comments about it not being ready for Prime Time. An awful lot of people would argue that TI 11 should have been strangled at birth as well, though as I said previously even this now seem to be behaving itself on my hardware.

 

New versions not being ready for Prime Time go back at least to TI9 and include every version, even the now-loved TI10, and although I wasn't there, maybe prior versions as well.

Many of us suspect the company is driven by the marketing department.

 

Is there no need for a VistaPE because it is so "fast"?

So, you can't restore back your image from Windows using TI 11?

Using TI 11 from a rescue CD I can do a 70GB image restore using a Vista computer in an hour - and really, it's almost exactly an hour. Would you consider that "good time"? (anybody can answer that)...

Thanks,
Sandy

 

I restored a TI11 Image of 100 GB today in one hour and five minutes...no kidding...I use an external Firewire HDD

Bob

 

Those earlier versions went through a boatload of updates. ATI11 had only one update and it addressed very little. Time will tell if ATI12/2009 gets significantly updated. Acronis is much more focused on enterprise sales than back in the days of earlier versions -- I suspect that, given that, plus the insistance ofn release a "new" version every year greatly limits Acronis's ability to deal with fixes/updates in the home software.

 

As each new Version of true image home is released I wonder if the person or committee responsible for the release has actually used the new release themselves on their own personal computer.

Somehow I do not think this is actually the case.

Xpilot

 

Yes, I can restore using TI11. The restore of the active partition even if started in Windows is actually done by the Linux rescue environment which is on the HD as well as the CD. When TI reboots it is loading the Linux environment. I made the VistaPE one just for laughs and to have around.

A normally compressed 70GB image restore in about an hour is a reasonably good time when using the CD. Using the Linux is as good as Windows in some cases but usually 1.5-2X slower, it depends on the included Linux driver suitability for your hardware.

 

Correct - at least on my HP QuadCore PC TI 2009 performed both backups and recoveries like an express train.

 

Okay, so my time of about an hour is not bad at all (and I use no compression - whether that is hurtful or helpful in regard to speed I have no idea.)

I have also learned when and how Linux works in regard to Acronis (hopefully other readers did as well.)

And one a last note - 2009 sounds like the new "Ferrari" on the block in regard to image software. This is a good thing too as people's computers do and hold more (movies, etc.) You don't want your image backup to take forever - or people will be less likely to do them.

Thanks everybody for sharing your info and experiences here as it does help everybody! (I certainly has me)...

Sandy

 

Well said... and it's tragic. It will be a bummer if they cease to care about the home user. If they start to act like Blackberry who doesn't give a darn about the "regular" user. If you don't use "Blackberry Enterprise Server" or BES, i.e., corporations use that... you literally have no chance in hell they will care or even talk to you. It is rare you can spend $432. for a product and have the software to sync, backup/restore and add/remove or upgrade to the device be literally NOT supported (unless you are under contract with them like a corporation.)

You can "feel it" when a company doesn't care about the regular or home user (whatever you want to call "us" or mayabe I should say "me.") I hope Acronis doesn't do this... I hope they still keep a place for "us."

Sandy

 

Compression takes more CPU power than no compression because it has to process the compress/decompress algorithm. It depends on your PC as usual. By compressing you reduce the amount of data that has to flow to/from the HD and the backup media.

If the bottleneck on your PC is low CPU power then compression may slow you down. If it is a slow archive system then no-compression may slow you down due to more data to copy over the "slow" link.

Rather than do a lot of speculating and navel-gazing, the easiest way is to run a test with compression and then without compression to see how much the time varies.

 

Interesting lesson on compression! Thanks for sharing...

Since my "speed" appears to be on the good side for both backup/restore I will leave my current scenario (in regard to compression) alone!

Sandy

 

I'm afraid I think Acronis are losing the plot, in just the same way that Ghost managed to transform itself from a useful, reliable tool to one that is just as likely as not to produce a broken, unrestorable archive.

Backup tools like this have to be reliable, you have to be able to take it as given that they provide reliable insurance against disaster, else they're a liability. The trouble is you cannot know unless you are the sort of person who vapes their hard disk and restores from image once a week. I had done test restores with 8, which is why I had good confidence in the programme. I assumed 10 was better and for 18m or so I've been using it. Occasionally I'd get errors, but a re-run would be OK.

I spent 3 long days last week wrestling with Acronis 10 (with latest SNAPI and patch), and have learned my confidence has been misplaced. For no obvious reason it had begun persistently halucinating disk errors on one partition of a disk (the other 3 partitions on that drive don't provoke this). Chkdsk (several times) found no errors.

The only recent change to this PC has been a change of graphics card (from ATI to Geforce) because SP3 would not coexist with the ATI drivers and threw the machine into an endless loop of rebooting.

I eventually managed to induce '10 to complete a backup by backing up to a different drive to the one I actually wanted to use. Naturally, when I tried to verify it, it reported the image was corrupt. So I copied it to yet another disk, whereupon '10 no longer alleged the archive was corrupt - but 80% through verification it failed with a disk read error. Chkdsk found no errors with that disk either. I then copied it back to its original location, and the 'corrupt archive' error had gone. So I ran verification again and it failed with an imaginary disk read error at a different point, about 50% through.

I went around this loop a couple more times and eventually obtained an archive that was allegedly OK and verified OK. This seems to have been a fluke, since I changed nothing. But do I trust that I would be able to restore OK? Not even slightly.

So next I went and looked at some older images made with 10 before the SP3 upgrade and graphics card change, and I found they too reported image corruption and/or disk errors.

I can't possibly place any confidence in this program's ability to fulfil it's only purpose of insurance against a disastrous hardware failure. I now feel a fool for exposing myself to this risk, and even more of one for paying to upgrade (= degrade my data safety).

I have reverted to Acronis 8 on this machine, and all week it has been succeeding in creating and verifying archives without any of this nonsense. What's more it's about 40% faster than 10.

More seriously I am now re-evaluating clients' backup strategies, whom I have recommended to use Acronis for imaging in the past. They're on '9. I now have to find out whether their images are usable. That will take me a 50ml trip and a day of my time, for which nobody is going to pay.

Unfortunately these problems are far too commonly reported in this forum, the same issues over and over again, for years. The answer, when there eventually is one, always seems to be 'upgrade to the new version'.

Sorry, no, it doesn't work like that. People are trusting their businesses to your products. Fix the software for which your customers have paid or find you have no customers anymore.

If and when you can prove against the evidence of this forum that later versions are not a flaky POS, I might think about u/g to obtain better performance or additional features - but after buying 2 licenses to the v.10 chocolate teapot (and advising clients to buy several more) I would have to be stupid to buy chocolate teapot 2009.

In all honesty, you owe all your customers a free upgrade to reliably functioning software, if you are still capable of making such a thing. I am certain you will do no such thing, because if you had the slightest concern you would have done it already. I am sticking with v8, and looking at competing products with urgency. Goodbye Acronis, you were good once.