Acronis True Image 11 Home [OLD VERSION]

This may be the first time in my long experience that I have ever written a review for a piece of software. Acronis TrueImage 11 is such a great discovery for me that I feel I must.I. The programFor seven or eight years my backup solution for home desktop computers has been to use a duplicate hard drive, periodically updating it with a current image of the normal working hard drive. In case of total hard drive failure or serious corruption I can move a couple of wires and be up and running again, having lost perhaps 20 minutes.But a few months ago I bought my first laptop. Doing a good total backup of its hard drive--boot sector, system files, applications, and all my data--was a whole new problem. My solution is a Seagate FreeAgent Go external hard drive combined with Acronis TrueImage 11.The capabilities of TrueImage 11 (hereinafter "TI") are head and shoulders above the simpler backup programs--a 1999 version of Norton Ghost and a version of Acronis MigtateEasy from around 2001--that I use with my desktop computers. TI purports to do what both of them do. For the laptop, what I needed was an updated verion of the 1999 Norton Ghost process of using a compressed image file, backing up a disk or partition and restoring it from that rather than making a disk clone. Short of actually clicking the last button to start restoring drive c: from the compressed image stored on the external hard drive, it seems to work beautifully. I have not seen any mention of failures during a disk image restore process.But what blew me away was finding that I can use TI to mount, or open, the disk image as a new drive letter and then use my usual file manager--such as My Computer or Windows Explorer--within the disk image created by TI. That way I can restore individual folders or files to drive c by the comfortable and familiar copy and paste method. I have not tried saving changes from a Word document or other application to it--why would I?--but I believe that would work fine and seamlessly. Optionally TI can mount the image as read only, which is what I have done.II. Tech supportIf your hard drive works mechanically but has developed a really serious software problem and you want to restore from a previous backup image file, you need a special removeable boot media, such as a CD or a USB flash drive. You use TI to create that, to use in case of need. I had one critical problem getting that boot media to work either from a CD or from a flash drive. The Acronis menu screen would appear, but selecting True Image led to a blank screen. Apparently there is some peculiarity about my laptop motherboard's APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller).But the point of this story is that no more than five minutes after I found the "pre-purchase chat" button on the Acronis website, I had a work-around that solved the problem--something like a secret password needed at that menu screen--simple, but no way to guess it. I have suggested to them that they at least include some clue to it on the menu screen that you get after starting the special boot media. I have it on a piece of paper in the box with my boot CD.A very happy camper.

I have mixed feelings about this product. It has bailed me out from a C: disk crash. However, I had many issues with the software (I will give examples below), support for problems is practically non existent (help only from the forums where other people are having the same issues) and when the crash happened I had very little hope that it would work. But it did. I now switched to a different back up method.When I bought this software, I wanted to have a backup history of about a month so I can go back to the old files if I made some sort of mistake. My hope was to run a full back up once a week, and then have differential backs 6 times a week, this way I could fit 7 different backups on a large disk designated for backups. The software claims to have a function that allows it to delete old backups based on a condition (% of disk full for example). But that never worked. Many other people complained about the same problem. When the disk became full, it simply stopped backing up. I had to remember to manually free up disk.Then I upgraded to a next version of the software which was supposed to have these problems fixed. However, the fix was to remove the functionality and what I wanted to do was not possible. The new version still had problems with incremental backups at disk full situation. In fact I left it double the amount of space necessary for one backup (as the forums indicated it needs temporary space while the backup is working). Finally, the only solution that worked was to have a full back up every day, with a rule that the previous copy had to be deleted before the new backup was created. Occasionally, it would still fail with messages that made no sense at all. I could get it to work again sometimes, if I deleted several backups and ran disk defragmenter. But this did not always help. And then in a few days it would begin working again. So it felt fragile and unreliable.As I was having various issues I contacted support several times (support is via email), they would get back to me in 2-3 weeks requesting some additional log file, to which they would respond maybe in another 2-3 weeks. By then whatever they said was not relevant, because I could not just wait for 4-6 weeks for a possibly helpful response. I would just wipe out the backups and start all over.Because the regular backups felt flakey, I also created "secure zone" back up, which is an option to have a backup on a separate partion. When the disk crashed, restore from secure zone did not work.So overall, using it was a very frustrating experience which was shared by a large number of other users based on the forum postings. The forum was the only place where I could get ideas of for possible solutions, and validation that the problems I was having were not unique to me.However there are some positive things about the product1. The feature that allows you to mount a back up and easily retrieve an old file as if it was just another volume is very nice2. The backups are fairly quick. I tried using Windows native back up and on my disks it did not even completed in 24 hours. Acronis backup for all my disk completed overnight (when it worked), when it did not it would sit at the prompt complaining about something with inscrutable message.3. Finally, when the disaster struck and my c: drive crashed, I was able to do a restore my C: drive from the backup to a brand new drive and it worked. I did not have to reinstall windows, all my settings and customization were preserved.Bottom line, this is only for those who have no other options. It requires constant baby-sitting. You need to manually check if it worked on daily basis, delete files, and just pay constant attention to it. But what you want from a backup is to enable it and forget it until you need it.

I have purchased two copies of this product and have them installed on both a XP and Vista machine. I have used it several times on both to restore my computers using both the acronis secure zone and a external USB hard drive. I've used the boot menu and Acronis boot disk I created to begin the restore. I did a complete restore to a hard drive from the external USB after deliberatly making my hard drive unbootable. That part of Acronis has worked flawlessly. I have run into some problems actually creating the secure zone on my hard drive. It took me several attempts to create one as I kept getting an error message and after rebooting....still no secure zone. I ended up creating it using the boot cd which seemed the only way to do it that would actually work. Other than that I find the program easy to use. I backup to both the secure zones as well as my external drives. I have not tried to create any dvd backups so I can not commment on that. Overall I would reccomend this program. It can be a real life saver. Especially if you can pick it up for $30 as you can here.

It is clear from some of the other reviews that folks have been having trouble with this software. All I can say is that it has worked like a dream for me; and that is both versions 10 and 11.I have installed and used it on several computers, XP desktops and laptops along with Vista destops. It has loaded and worked perfectly when launched from within windows or from the distribution CD. I wouldn't be without it!A tip for you folks who say you are losing date because you reinstall windows... There is no need to lose that data. When you set up windows make a second partition (D drive in most cases) and save your data there. When you restore windows to your C drive your precious data won't be destroyed.

Having had my Hard Disc fail I had become neurotic about it happening again so I fitted two new HDs to my computer and reinstalled all of my programmes onto one of them. I then wanted to use the other HD as a back-up and bought Acronis True Image 11 to do this for me.Acronis was no problem to install. It is then easy to make a mirror image of my C: drive on the second HD and recover everything easily if my C: drive fails again.Acronis can be set to automatically make a full back-up as often as you wish. It can also be set to automatically make incrmental back-ups of the changes since the last back-up. Setting this us, however, was confusing since it asks for a Password before confirming that the automatic back-up instructions are activated. As I hadn't provided it with a Password I was rather stuck until I found that one can just ignore everything about Passwords and just hit RETURN. Then everything works well.I find this a very good programme which has taken away all fears of a future HD crash. Well worth the money.

I purchased 2 copies of Acronis True Image Home 11.00 a month ago. This software still does not work properly even after I have spent hours writing to customer support and carrying out their instructions trying to solve the problem. Their support reply assumes MSDOS knowledge (entering commands from the command line in a DOS window) that I have had to revise from years ago. How many modern day computer users have ever heard of the MSDOS command line, let alone know how to type in commands on it. They sent instructions requiring me to use one of their utilities without telling me where to obtain it and then I had to wait 8 days for further replies to get it.I have spent hours trying their utility and applying their instructions that do not work. I was told to get a report by running their utility once more and issuing the command "get report>c:\schedreport.txt" (without quotes) but it DOES NOT WORK.I have told them that DIR>list.txt prints out a directory list to file before running their utility but not after running it (which also leaves me unable to change directory). They replied by saying "get report>c:\schedreport.txt" probably did not work because I left out spaces either side of the redirection operator ">". If they try DIR_ >list.txt (where _ is a space) they will find that the space between the command and the ">" means the ">" will not work, so spaces are not the reason for failure. How can these people be trusted so restore your system when your hard disk fails?I am now completely fed up with this software, which has obviously been put on the market before it has been tested to work properly. I have asked Amazon if I can return it and get a refund and they immediately agreed. I give 10/10 to Amazon and 1/10 to Acronis.I note that other Amazon reviewers are not happy with Norton Ghost either, so where do you get reliable backup software. I will be using "Karen's Replicator" to back up my files in the future and the Windows Backup for the complete system. Both are free.

This must be the hardest back up software ever written - another useless purchase

I used Acronie True Image 10 for almost a year (my husband is using it now on a geriatric PC running Windows XP Pro) before I upgraded to Acronis 11 with XP Pro & Office Pro on my newish desk top. No, not Vista yet! Everthing runs smoothly to our chosen schedules and is backed up to an external hard drive. I had early issues with running out of space despite setting the required allocation for one Full back up followed by 6 Differentials, according to the manual which I downloaded in full. Why not give their Tech Help a phone call as I did, to get the space allocation sorted. At 1p. a minute to the USA its hardly a big deal! Both work flawlessly for both of us, and sends emails to confirm the backups have been successful or not, whichever is the case. But for that, I would give it the full 5 stars. The message is RTFM!! You can even do a try out with v.11, so what is the fuss!