Losing faith in Acronis

I have been using Acronis for close to a year now. Really love it. The 2014 version is just great. I have the pro version it was something like 20 bucks more well worth it. Backs up everything nicely and puts it back in the right spot. Like others have said quickbooks is it own can of worms.

I would say i have used it maybe 400 times in the last 6 months and it only messed up once and it was really my fault not the programs. I would whole heartily recommend Acronis
 
AndyM said:
Why not use a hardware based solution?

http://www.startech.com/HDD/Duplicators/?sort=3

Certain models can also erase using triple pass. And... it free's up your PC to do more essential tasks.

Andy
Click to expand...

I think those devices are fine for healthy disk cloning but what about drives with problems ? How can you tell if the cloning is hitting bad sectors or where trouble areas are ? What does it do when it hits a bad spot, does it just skip or abort ? With a PC base cloning setup you can watch the progress, see all bad spots, how many re-reads or total failures of a read/write. Do those machines have some kind of output to a computer or monitor ? Most of the drive cloning we do is because of a bad drive, so I really like to see whats going on.
 
phaZed said:
I didn't know Parted Magic went to a purchase model. No thanks. I still run the free version of PM over PXE, guess that won't be upgraded. I run Kali Linux (Formerly Backtrack) which is a pen testing setup. It has all of the tools that Parted Magic has and more.. I think GParted was missing, but that is easily added (for free, obviously) from the Package Manager. Can be run from the CD too, like most Linux variants. Good luck Parted Magic, they're gonna need it!
Click to expand...

PM is certainly one of the very best tools out there for technicians. It's constantly updated and improved, and it always works the first time every time. I'm not sure why anyone would have an issue paying $5 for something that earns you money and is a valuable addition to your toolbox. We're not talking R-Studio prices here.
 
LifelineIT said:
PM is certainly one of the very best tools out there for technicians. It's constantly updated and improved, and it always works the first time every time. I'm not sure why anyone would have an issue paying $5 for something that earns you money and is a valuable addition to your toolbox. We're not talking R-Studio prices here.
Click to expand...

Sure, no I understand and agree. PM is a nice distro and has given very me very little in the way of problems. I would certainly agree that if a tech wants to buy a copy of PM, go right ahead.

My problem is that there are any number of Linux distro's that do the exact same thing and they are free (In the spirit of Linux, if your into that Open-Source mentality). The "working every time" aspect doesn't come from Parted Magic per say, it comes from the Linux Kernel. Parted Magic simply packages a bunch of free software together as an ISO and keeps it updated. But that's not a novel idea or anything, all of the distro's do that.

Let's not muddy the waters either, PM is charging $5 for a one-time download of the current version, and $50 for a year.

The free Kali Linux on the other hand is the defacto, go-to Distro for security, reverse engineering, exploitation, and hard drive analysis/recovery - used by Law Enforcement and white/black hat hackers alike - Created by Offensive Security, a leader in computer security. They offer a full ISO or a Mini ISO for direct booting and you can PXE boot it as well. All of the same tools in PM are also contained in Kali. I would contest that Kali contains even more functionality out-of-the-box. As far as I can see they are using the same Linux Kernel too. So why should I pony over $5 or even $50 for the year for what is truly GNU free software? PartedMagic isn't doing anything special here.

I just don't see PM going anywhere when there is Kali (Used to be Backtrack), NodeZero, BackBox, BlackBuntu, Ubuntu, Samurai, Knoppix, Pentoo, Matriux, DEFT, CAINE, Bugtraq, Helix, Ophcrack, Katana, etc etc etc... that all do the same thing. Just my .2 cents.
 
I will say I kind of liked Acronis, but this last computer I was working on, Acronis was taking forever, days. ddrescue got the failing drive copied to a working one in less than 24 hours.
 
phaZed said:
I didn't know Parted Magic went to a purchase model. No thanks. I still run the free version of PM over PXE, guess that won't be upgraded. I run Kali Linux (Formerly Backtrack) which is a pen testing setup. It has all of the tools that Parted Magic has and more.. I think GParted was missing, but that is easily added (for free, obviously) from the Package Manager. Can be run from the CD too, like most Linux variants. Good luck Parted Magic, they're gonna need it!
Click to expand...

Parted Magic is now paid because the person that created it lost his job and needed to support his family. Well worth the $5 investment.
 
I heard that PM also has a GUI for ddrescue, I'll have to give it a shot soon.

Acronis has a bit of a klunky interface if you need to resize multiple partitions, and if the drive has pending sectors/read problems, you have to wait for the error to pop up before you can tell it to ignore read errors. Otherwise it's been fairly reliable.

Tried Aomei a while back, but it would only clone 3 partitions. Not so good for Win8 OEM systems.
 
Never buy True Image over Acronis backup. In my experience Acronis backup (formely known as acronis backupp & recovery) has always been the superior product in reliability.
 
I've no problem paying for good software. It can separate you from the amateurs. I've paid for Partition Magic along with many other software packages. Back to topic. I was an Acronis user having both the Backup & Recover and Disk Director. It worked great for me for a long while but I gave up on it after I had issues reinstalling it. I even had Acronis removed in and it was never right.
 
I have been using Active@ Disk Image Pro for a few years. I install it then make a boot CD. It supports windows server also, whereas Acronis Home does not. The progress to completion GUI is accurate and fast, whereas Acronis is slow and not accurate about minutes left.

I also use Acronis sometimes and buy the new versions every year to make sure it keeps up with the latest OS and AF technologies.

One time I was using Acronis Home to backup Windows Server 2003, guess what, it will not restore it. OS not supported. They should tell you that when you try to make the backup then, Doh!
 
Acronis has had a *serious* downhill slide over the past 4 years. I knew a few people in high positions there, including Dimitri (Always appeared as a tech on the company directory, but he owned it). My main contact was the marketing director, who took the company from a $650,000 a year to a $16M a year company. I took my ACE Certification (Acronis Certified Engineer) which I passed. Then they fired the marketing guy. Then they got a whole lot of Symantec guys in. Then it all started to go wrong.

I still have my copies of, well, just about everything they did at the time, including Disk Director Server. Over this weekend, I needed to resize a partition on a client PC. I was doing it remotely, and Disk Director wouldn't cut it. I downloaded and installed Aomei Partition Assistant Standard (which is free!), installed it, and resized D:, moved D: to the end of the drive, and increased the size of C:. All done remotely.

Now I just don't touch Acronis. Such a shame. Good company going bad.

I am still in touch with the marketing guy, who's a freelance IT journalist now.

Andy

Edit: Oh.. Disk Imaging. I've started to use a little program called ActiveImage Protector 3.5 - Think Shadow Protect, but BETTER!!!
 
I lost faith many years ago. After it failed with lots of images. And it just happened I was at a trade event and a lot of the management where there I tackled them on my problems. There answer our software won't causes that and they refused to listen. So I stopped using it after that.

Paul
 
AndyM said:
Edit: Oh.. Disk Imaging. I've started to use a little program called ActiveImage Protector 3.5 - Think Shadow Protect, but BETTER!!!
Click to expand...

Just signed up Andy to give it a try. I use Shadow Protect and really like it but if this is faster I will have a look at it. Thanks.
 
Just seen this thread.

Why Acronis has to leave junk all over a system registry beats me.

I spent 5 hours chasing it around a system with error 39 usb driver issues yesterday... No matter what I plugged in, how many times I rebuilt the USB stack...

I won't be recommending it any time soon.
 
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