Experiences on running Acronis True Image 2013
Monday, April 8. 2013
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.
Anton Deev on :
Thank you for posting your experiences with Acronis software. My name is Anton and I'm writing you on behalf of Acronis Customer Central
As mentioned in the forum, consolidation time may vary depending on the amount of backups and their size.
Were you able to install the latest update of True Image 2013 by Acronis to check if the issues that you reported on your laptop are there?
We offer 30 days aftersales support via e-mail and chat. After that period or if you require phone support you can pay a support fee. We do not charge for recovery issues and if there is a known problem in the product we will refund your support fee.
Please let me know if there is anything else we can do for you.
Best regards,
Anton Deev
Acronis Customer Central
Jari Turkia on :
Most of the environments I'm using my laptop in, are enforcing HTTP-proxy for outgoing traffic. Since Acronis does not use that at all, for example automatic update checks don't work at all.
Since you mentioned that, I did use a bigger hammer to knock a hole into a network and got an updated version. Now my build 5551 is updated into build 6514, but I have not experienced any issues yet. It remains to be seen if the new version helped with the unresponsive user interface -issue.
Sean on :
Sean on :
Matt on :
Hal m on :
First, the instructions require an engineering degree which i have. I had to restore a win 8.1 machine and could not do it without 3 hours of tech support taking over my machine twice. On another machine with win 7, 32 gb memory, fast i7 and graphics cards, i could not restore my data drive using restore (again after 3 hours with tech support). I had use the image function for this and was told i should only use file backup function. However, the file browser and recovery feature also failed to work. After multiple tries, and up to 30 minutes waiting for it to list files (with a few crashes in between- had to manually kill the running process) i was able to get a few folders back, but it never was able to recover others. Fortunately, i have another pc i use synctoy with and it had all the files.
I used Norton Ghost up to version 15 and it really worked well. It saved me several times from major crashes.
This is incredibly bad software.
I am now using windows 7 backup function for files an its imaging.
I'd love to find software that actually works; however reviews on other software seem equally bad.
Jari Turkia on :
I've continued to use ATI 14, but I know that when the situation comes my backups are not necessarily restorable. Which is a shame!