Acronis TrueImage Home - Backup Software

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By chance only just purch Acronis True Image Home V 11 and your article was perfect guidence for using what I purchased in a Pro-manner.
Thanks a Bunch,
Gene Brown in Charlotte, NC

Hi, I would like to mention that any external hard disc that is used for your back up must be removed from the system after your backup, I made the mistake of using two partition's in my External hard disc, one for my backups the other for programmes that I didn't want on my computer internal hard disc, hence I always had my External hard disc connected, don't know why yet, but my backup was corrupted, I lost all my backups the Acronis 11 partition was completely empty.
Did the Acronis report, Acronis told me of the corruption.
One good thing came out of this, my Try and Decide had never worked, I have now found that the programme can be re downloaded from my account on the Acronis web site, this cured my problems with the Acronis programme.
I have had to restore on two occasions, Acronis worked like a dream each time, it certainly does what it says it can do.
Hope this helps someone.
Regards
Roy Phillips

I find a glaring problem with this article that was slightly covered by a comment:
I have a 180GB backup of my entire system using Acronis True Image 11. Sounds responsible right?
Well, when the time came to restore my OS with TI 11, It simply said, and I have realized too late, that my backup on my 500GB External drive cannot be used with TI11 - so what's the point? I can't very well store a 200GB image on my internal HD.
I'm at a loss as to how you say that it works so great from your external drive....
It backed up alright, giving me a nice 'false' sense of security. That recover disk booted, I found the image on my external (all as instructed) and then I find out that it will not apply the image even though it's found it, because it's an external USB drive. That is a real buzz-kill!

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I guess I don't understand the issue you're having. The fact
that it's on an external drive *shouldn't* impact anything.
Yes, I'll reiterate that I confirmed the ability to restore
from an external USB drive before recommending this product.

The only thing I can think of is that there's something
different about your drive or USB setup that the Acronis
restoration program doesn't recognize. While that's no
consolation to you it's certainly *not* a common case.

As long as Windows recognizes the drive, you'll at a minimum
be able access that backup from within Windows.

Leo

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I've had Acronis 10 for quite a while. I use an external 160GB hard drive for backup storage from my 400GB Sata drive.

Finally I had to restore. It went very smoothly and I was pleased at the initial outcome. However, (and I assume it's because Acronis runs on the Linux program) that all of my drive letters were changed. Hence, all my shortcuts on the desktop were out of sequence.

So I engaged Partition Magic to change them back to what they originally were. I had 4 partitions, operating system, programs, video and documents,pictures,music. So I went to change the letters back to what they originally were; however, because of an unused removable disk letter (one of the memory stick drives) taking up one of the original drive letter names I couldn't change all of them back to their correct paths.

And I'm still trying to figure out how to rectify and try to reason why it changed the drive letters.

I have had TrueImage 11 now for since April, 2008. Most of its features work well, except for "Save Application Settings". If I select the All button, the function crashes. If I do subsets it works fine. I can do 4 or 5 in the list at a time. I use Vista Home Premium with SP1. I reported this to Acronis and they are "working on it". They had me send crash dumps after each new build, but to date it is still not functioning. Also, only a small number of applications (9 or 10) show in the list. I don't now if this correct.

Just to let everyone know. Acronis is not that reliable. Oh yes, it completes the im-age, and you can verify it too. But then when the fateful day arrives that you really need it - it fails. We see this over and over on the Wilder’s forum.
http://tinyurl.com/94qc58
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?s=00ded41e5713f77bed83ba85c0f1d1da&f=65
So if you go down this route, test your image to make sure it is good. And the only way to safely do this is to throw in a new HD, and attempt to restore to it.
I’m a computer tech. When I’m doing heavy duty malware cleaning or other low level repairs, I clone the customer’s drive over to one of mine. After I’m done, I clone back. This way I always have a safety net if Windows spirals out of con-trol. Anyhow, twice Acronis has corrupted the source drive. The last time I was cloning a new Vista HP laptop, and Acronis froze up. After rebooting the source drive would not boot! This is unacceptable. I was able to fix it though.
So be wary of your backups, and be pre-pared for mishaps. Do some of your backups with the highly reliable older Ghost program. I use v. 11 Corporate or Ghost 2003, boot CDs.
Packrat1947

For the last year i have been using Norton Ghost to backup 3 systems. But on the 4th system, I use the Maxtor One Touch disk and the Maxtor Manager that comes with it. I find this to be the ultimate in Ease of Use. A lot simpler than the Ghost, Acronis, Macrium, Clonezilla and all the others. Plus it comes with the recovery disk - so you don't even have to worry about burning that like when you download any of the others from the web.

I wonder if Range Rover may have created an Acronis Secure Zone on his USB drive rather than merely backing up to a folder . The Acronis Manual says specifically that the Secure Zone will not work on an external USB drive , I back up to a Folder e.g. BakupC on my USB and a restore has not been a problem .
Note that the Secure Zone is formatted Fat 32 not NTFS and therein may lie the problem possibly ?

I use Genie Backup Manager Pro and it's quite reliable, although one cannot save a disk image. I've seen here and also elsewhere on the Web that there are big problems with Acronis, and so, even though I've bought it, I don't use it.

By the way, in the first bullet above, did you mean to say that you could restore the entire "HD", rather than "CD" ?

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