Hacker's ramblings

This is a follow up on Windows Backups -article I wrote earlier.

I've been running Acronis on daily basis on a couple of Windows-machines to take a backup into a NAS-box. I have been mostly happy with the software, but ... Here is my grievance list:

• Consolidation: Completely worthless! A number of users according to Acronis' forums are having problems with it. The recommended approach is not to use it. See: 36241: Consolidation Process Hanging. There was an occasion when I waited for 30+ hours for the consolidation to complete. It did, but come on! 30 hours to copy 80 GiB of data! On a best case-scenario it does really weird things, aborting with no obvious reason and leaving temp files lying around.
  
• Laptop backup: Works ok when destination NAS-box is reachable, completely worthless when not. There is NO way to cancel the job besides holding down the power button (my laptop does not have a reset). I spent roughly an hour trying to cancel / kill / nuke / stop a backup job which is failing to write a backup for obvious reason that the destination drive was not there to be written into. I shouldn't be too hard to automatically abort a backup job when the network connection is not there. This is the worst issue I've been experiencing.
  
• NAS-drive not found: This happens occasionally on a laptop, but not on a desktop PC. The problem is a weird one. Every possible test I do from TrueImage or Windows Explorer indicate that everything is there and accessible, but the job does not see that for some unknown reason. This can be circumvented with a cancel job / start job -pair. Sometimes a previous, already existing backup needs to be pointed manually to ATI. I don't know why it lost connection with the file which has existed after ATI wrote it.
  
• Support period: Pretty short for new user. Couple of weeks or so. I got my product installed and running, but when there were real issues (see above), the support was already gone.
  

I've been looking for any suitable competing products, but apparently there are none available. The lack of better backup solution leaves me running Acronis TI. This is pretty close to a good product, but apparently the developers cannot be bothered with this type of easily fixable minor issues.