Acronis True Image 11 Home Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)A couple of months ago there was a power outage, and even though my UPS kicked in, the auto-shutdown software didn't. When I tried to reboot, there was a Blue Screen of Death waiting for me. I tried everything from reinstalling XP, to recovery console, safe mode, BIOS fiddling, nothing worked.
I didn't have any backups, so I was out of luck. But as I went through the incredibly time consuming drudgery of reinstalling Windows and 50 or so other programs that I had on my original install, I kept thinking to myself, "there has to be a better way".
So I decided to spare no expense. My first purchase was a 2TB external hard-drive (split to 1TB with RAID 1), and my second was this software. And it works like a charm for my use (btw, I don't consider DVD backups to be a viable option).
The first step in backing up my new install was to establish a secure zone on my RAIDed drive (about 25 GB). This is a special partition invisible to the OS (and viruses, spyware, etc.) so it can't be accidentally deleted or modified. This was simple to do, and the hidden partition's size can be adjusted at any time.
I performed the initial backup with no problems. A previous reviewer mentioned that the green progress bar wasn't providing sufficient feedback. For my purposes, however, I don't back up individual sets of files or folders, I back up the entire hard drive, bit for byte, to include the MFTs and Boot sectors, etc. I don't need to see what's being copied at any given moment, because I already know its either a '0' or a '1'. Anyway, compression is decent (9 GB for 20 GB worth of files) and fast (usually 10-15 minutes to complete).
I've also set up a scheduled weekly backup which is done "incrementally" and only saves the changes from the original. TrueImage will automatically delete old backups to make room for new ones, as you begin to fill up your "secure zone".
I've actually begun to use this in lieu of "System Restore". I try to keep most of my regularly updated stuff on my RAIDed external drive now (I actually moved "My Documents" there) and anytime I have a serious problem I can actually restore the system to a previous state week by week. I've already done this 3 or 4 times in the past 2 months using a boot CD created by the software and it works flawlessly.
It's a good feeling to know that you can reverse any changes made to your system. There's even a feature called 'Try and Decide' that let's you do this in real-time and undo any changes made during an installation or other activity. If you're looking for a robust backup solution that perhaps doesn't involve backing up to CDs/DVDs, this software will work for you.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Acronis True Image 11 Home

Acronis True Image 11 Home provides the maximum flexibility to ensure you are adequately protected and can recover from unforeseen events such as viruses unstable software downloads and hard drive failures. Create an exact copy of your PC for a full backup or backup only your important data ? your choice. Creates an exact copy of your PC for a full backup Backs up and restores your music video and data Protects your applications Boot your computer even if your operating system has failed and restore your system image from Acronis Secure Zone Backs up your e-mails and Outlook data and settings Try & Decide: easy rollback of system changes Protects your PC application configuration settings Schedules backups automatically by time or system events Privacy protection Supports Microsoft Windows Vista Email notifications Saves to FTP Format: WIN 2000XPVISTA Genre:UTILITIES UPC:890204002043

Click here for more information about Acronis True Image 11 Home

Read More...

Acronis True Image Backup 9.0 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Cons: Truly bad support, documentation of error codes is completely non-existent, etc. They won't help you and you won't be able to help yourself.
This product has been absolutely dreadful for us even though we're using the newest build released just yesterday (5/22/2006).
The backups of files we select seems straightforward and the process tells us the backup was successful, but then when we go to restore from it we get one error message after another (both when trying to back up to DVDs, and then to the hard drive itself [just in case the DVDs was the issue]). Either way, we still have all kinds of error messages and unreliable backup of data using this product.
Oh, and if you need technical support what you get is you send an e-mail and in A FEW DAYS OR SO IF YOU'RE LUCKY someone responds with a canned answer that's useless and has little to do with the problem you've had to describe to them since no one will talk to you on the phone. (If you want to talk to a human you have to pay $29.99, and that's right after you just paid them for the product that never worked once.)
This is truly the worst PC product I've ever had the misfortune of ATTEMPTING to use in over 20 years of doing this, and the company has an attitude problem -- they want your money but they don't want to hear from you (or help you) after they've got it.
For some people the product seems to work, but for those for whom it doesn't, you will find as I do that this company will be little to no help to you at all.
UPDATE:
My problem with this software turned out to be the length limitation on file paths, and since all the backup files are in a tree branch structure of files, some folders plus subfolders plus file names plus the stuff the program adds makes the name too long for the program to handle. I had to figure this out for myself over two full days (add that to the price of the product!) because Acronis doesn't tell you that (perhaps by including a box of tips in the backup section) and doesn't provide a list of error codes and what they might indicate as the problem. Tech support is non-existent unless you want to pay $29.99 per call, and all of this that I went through was completely avoidable. In fact, I got a hunch the file name length might be the issue from using someone else's product which just plain SAID SO. If Acronis isn't going to help the user the should provide the means for the user to help himself, but they don't, and even when they add features like the DVD burning feature they don't update the downloadable or web site information about it -- it just shows up as a bullet point on a list of features at the time of this writing. You may have no problems with this, but if you do you are on your own. Personally I would look somewhere else for your backup needs just in case something goes wrong and you need answers. Good luck!

Click Here to see more reviews about: Acronis True Image Backup 9.0

Complete file and system disk imaging backup and restore software for home and home office users that can protect your entire system and family pictures, videos, music, and important documents stored on your PC.

Click here for more information about Acronis True Image Backup 9.0

Read More...

Acronis Disk Director V11 Home Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This product caused me a lot of problems yesterday. While I have never made a review like this before, I felt like I should offer this cautionary tale:
I bought this product after receiving several emails the upgrade from my previous version of DD 1o, which would no longer run on my laptop. Tried the trial version first and it looked like it would do what I wanted. My laptop was partitioned by DD 10 in 2 and I wanted to give the OS a little more space as I had used up the 37GB I had initially allocated that partition. And, it worked! Next I installed it on my 2 Desktops. On both of them it caused my computer to not boot up correctly until I selected "Start from last known good configuration." Next I tried to merge a small unallocated bit of HD space into the Partition of my older PC, which required a reboot.
Thant is when things started to go terribly wrong.
I got an error message during the reboot that process 2 failed.
And, the system failed to boot after that. Just a message about "Verifying DMI Pool Data."
So, I took the drive out and tried to use the included "Recovery Expert" module from DD 11 loaded on my other PC to restore the old partition.
But, the Recovery Expert module would not load. If I tried run it directly, and not from within DD I got a snapapi.dll not found error.
I went to the website, found how to chat with tech support, and was on with Ankur very quickly.
And, put immediately on hold. While I was clear about the situation, his advice to me was far less than helpful. ""Recovery Expert is for recovering deleted partitions." He said after several minutes. Yes, that is why I want to use it I explained. Kinda thought that was obvious. Several minutes later he came back with this; "You do not need to verify the product, it should work." YES, I KNOW IT SHOULD WORK, BUT IT DOESN'T. (No alt caps when I explained this to him.
So, I tried uninstalling, with the intent to reinstall. Got an error there too.
Next, I ran the installer again and choose repair.
That did it! I was able to use the Recovery Expert!
And, it looked like it worked.
But my joy was short lived, since when I put the drive back in my older PC, I still could not boot. After several hours of trying this, updating my Bios settings, etc I got nowhere.
Eventually I had to give up and wipe the drive. Now that rig is out of commission. :-(
Sad especially since I had a lot of expensive software on there. Fortunately I didn't have any critical files.
In conclusion:
The older Disk Director Suite was not very stable, at least by my own use, and a number of reviewers here on Amazon that gave it one star and called it dangerous.
This product may be better, hard to tell from my limited experience.
I found the free chat support fast but useless, I had multiple issues with instillation on my PCs, and the product itself performed a resizing of the partition on my laptop successfully, but and when I tried a simple merge of a small file it ended up ruining the OS and destroying all the data on the disk. Was it worth $30.00 to upgrade? After spending 9 hours trying to fix the OS on my PC that this program destroyed.... in a word. NO!
If you are going to use Disk Director 11 Home:
MAKE A BACKUP OF ANYTHING YOU VALUE & USE WITH EXTREME CATION.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Acronis Disk Director V11 Home

With Acronis Disk Director 11 Home, the ultimate Disk Management Solution, it's never been easier to create hard disk partitions, resize, move, or merge partitions without data loss. Optimized to offer maximum freedom without impacting your current system!

Get 20% OFF

Click here for more information about Acronis Disk Director V11 Home

Read More...

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This is probably the worst software I've used in years--probably in the last decade. If you are using old operating systems or old hardware, you may be fine, but with XP64 or Vista on the latest hardware, it repeatedly corrupted my hard drive partions rendering them not only unbootable but generally unrecoverable. Another bug is that my wireless mouse would only work during the first welcome/splash screen of the boot CD but not the actual utility once it loaded. I had to hook up a PS/2 mouse. Even that didn't work all of the time (like when I had a 2nd drive plugged in).
Aside from the hardware problems, it plain destroyed partitions and corrupts MBRs. I'll give you some examples. Resize NTFS cluster sizes renders Windows completely unbootable and corrupted. Changing drive letters renders the system unbootable. Setting a partition active corrupts the drive. Performing operations on an external USB drive completely corrupted the drive, and I couldn't fix with any other DOS/Windows utilities that I had. I had to fix it on my Mac! Note that you cannot clone a drive or partition. You can only copy a partition which assigns the wrong drive letter and as noted above you cannot correct without losing all the data. Many operations require multiple reboots for each step involved and some steps fail/crash. Sometimes, it would set the wrong partition active. Finally, copying partitions from one drive to another failed inexplicably and crashed about 1/2 the time. The only operations I was consistently successful at were trivial operations like partition resizes which Vista does natively anyway. Operations that I could do in their "demo" (it is NOT a trial) are fake. They could not be performed using the real software which was the latest version. Please note that my system is otherwise stable and all the native Vista disk utilities/operations work flawlessly. I have used disk utilities like Partition Magic, Norton Ghost, Drive Image, etc., for decades so I am not a newbie.
The final reason for 1 star (zero if I could ), I purchased this direct from Acronis via Digital River. Their support is horrible (basically auto-replies) if they ever respond. Despite having a 30-day money back guarantee, you will never see your money again. This product sets new lows in the already shaky computer hardware/software industry.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0

Avoid putting off the task of repartitioning your hard disk drive because of the time consuming task of reinstallingoperating systems, applications and the recovery of data. Now with Disk Director Suite you can easily separate system data from personal documents and increases PC performance and data safety! Easily recover any inadvertently deleted partitions or edit hard disk drives!

Get 8% OFF

Click here for more information about Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0

Read More...