Am 18.10.2007 12:08 (e-mail address removed) wrote
As far as system backup, Acronis True Image seems to be the way to
go. Any suggestions on imaging products?
There is people who love Acronis TrueImage and people who hate it. I
used to love it up to version 8. Back then everybody loved it. So they
became very successfull and started to become something, that I would
call a marketing-company. They split features into several versions
(makes the marketshare bigger) support is plain shit, the stories about
unreliable backups are not seldom.
With version 9Home all my backups were corrupt. Support was like this:
a) Get other USB drivers.
Where from ? I use the standard WindowsXP/SP2
b) Get a Firewire-Cable (cable !). Use this instead of your USB2.0
How is getting a Firewire cable enough for a USB2.0 system ? Of course,
I would have needed to buy a new external enclosure and a Firewire
controller for my PCI bus. Would have meant an additional investment of
ca. 60-70 Euro. Add this to the software's price, which was 50 Euro.
110-120 Euro. And that would have meant... (see below)
c) Check disk on another bus.
I checked it on SATA (before doing the previous recommendations). Still
corrupt archives.
d) Try and install the evaluation version of TI Home 10.
I did. And voilá ! Now the backups were fine. No corruption. TI10 worked
as TI9 was advertised.
Their offer ?
They would give me TI10 for the same upgrade price as I would have payed
regulary when upgrading from TI9 to TI10.
Pardon me ? It was *their* mistake, which clearly got solved in the new
version. It was a software-bug/incompetency on their side. They should
have silently offered me TI10 for free!
As it is now I purchased TI9Home and could never use it. Thrown out the
money, I'd say.
Other users moan about the frequency of new major revisions. The
arguments are similare: Old bugs still there, but no fixes and the new
version comes out, which needs to be payed for (again).
Also, many of the new features are pretty useless, IMO and more of a
marketing-type. Like the one-click backup of Outlook mails in the latest
release. Or application backups (and only a very few, exclusivley MS
products, are supported). The only new feature I like is the possibility
to mount File-Backups as VFS. Before one could only mount Image-Backups
this way. But: Why wasn't that already implemented in the last version ?
Don't want to be too harsh, but it was maybe just a design decision by
their marketing team, as to offer something valuable with V11.
And for those, who want to script the application. Only possible in the
proffesional version, and one needs to purchase the SDK seperatley
("Contact us"). Oh, come on !
No thanks. Since then I am seeking for a new Image solution, that adds
some of the comfort TrueImage has. I even theoretized about writing my
own, since I think Backups are one of the most important tasks and one
of the most underestimated things. But the taks would be too big for me,
at least, if I'd want to deliver some of the comfort functions, that I
find important (mounting archives as VFS, replacing Windows System
Restore, having VolumeShadowCopy, etc.)
