Products Behaving Badly: Acronis True Image 2012

[David Baxter PhD]

Products Behaving Badly: Acronis True Image 2012
by David Baxter
August 22, 2012

I recently bought and installed Acronis True Image 2012 (I won?t provide a link because I do NOT recommend this product at all). I realized within a couple of days that this would not do what I wanted on my laptop so I uninstalled it, thinking perhaps I might use it on my desktop. When I did so, Windows 7 warned me that Windows Backup was not running.

Now during installation Acronis had by default checked an option called ?Integrate True Image into Windows? ? an innocuous sounding option which seemed like a good idea. What is NOT made clear is that this disables and replaces Windows built-in Backup and Restore utility. Bad enough ? but okay? not too difficult to turn Windows Backup on in Control Panel.

But now comes the real horror story:

A few days later I had an issue with my Windows laptop and wanted to do a quick System Restore to an earlier checkpoint. To my utter astonishment, I discovered that Acronis had disabled this feature in Windows 7: There were no Restore points available at all!

In time, I was able to fix the issue manually, turn System Restore back on, and create a restore point.

But I am still outraged. At no point during the installation was I given a choice or warned by Acronis that their installation would turn off System Restore.

This is in my opinion totally and completely unacceptable behavior on the part of ANY product installer.

A huge THUMBS DOWN to Acronis. I would issue a strong warning to everyone to stay away from any and all Acronis products. Ever.

 

[Retired]

Reviews of Acronis True Image have been reporting trouble with this product for some time. Check out the product reviews for Acronis on Amazon.com where just about everyone echoes your experience.

I have yet to find a satisfactory backup utility that works and does not hijack your system.

Windows Backup has been a disappointment as well, failing to update itself after the second or third scheduled backup.

The only backup that has worked flawlessly for me for the last year and a half has been Carbonite, though I would have liked to have a reliable local backup as well, but so far have not had success.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Your comment about Windows Backup surprises me, Steve. I've had it working reliably on several Windows computers in recent years without incident. The only issue I have ever encountered is where my backup drive is starting to tun out of disk space and that's been my only complaint about Windows Backup - although there is a setting to let Windows manage the drive space on the backup drive, it doesn't work as well as it should and periodically I'll see an Action Center alert telling me it wasn't able to complete that last weekly backup because it ran out of room. When that happens, I go in and manually delete some old backups and/or disk images.

I particularly like the version in Windows 7 because whenever there IS an issue it's easily visible in the Action Centre tray notifier when I return to my computer. I have the Action Center tray icon set to Display Always (Show icon and notifications) but that's a personal preference.

 

[Retired]

I had forgotten that at one point last year I installed Acronis on a trial basis when I later discovered it had hijacked some operations. At about the same time, I was dealing with issues caused when I uninstalled Norton 360 and had to do some registry corrections.

So, it's possible what I am currently experiencing with Windows Backup could be fallout from those events, although it is known that Carbonite interacts with Windows Backup by disabling a particular part of its ability to operate correctly as well.

The recommendation is to disable Carbonite while operating Windows Backup, but that "fix" has only succeeded intermittently for me.

 

[Acronis Support]

Hello David,

Thank you for sharing your experiences with Acronis software. My name is Anton, and I'm writing you on behalf of Acronis Customer Central.

We are very sorry that you experienced this issue, however, it only affects certain Windows machines. We have an article in our Knowledge Base article that addresses this issue.

Should you have any additional questions, please feel free to contact us by visiting Backup software for data backup and disaster recovery in Windows and Linux - Acronis.

Please let me know if I can assist you with anything else today.

Best regards,
Anton Deev
Acronis Customer Central

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Thank you for the link to the article, Anton. In my case, I've already found and fixed the errors but others may find it helpful.

Your comments, however, do not address the lack of transparency in the installer, which DISABLED core Windows backup and restore functions without prior warning, or the lack of alerts in the uninstaller which should have warned me that those features had been turned off and REMAINED turned off.

I cannot recommend your product to anyone at all.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

It actually gets worse: I've now discovered that since installing and uninstalling this product none of my USB thumbnail drives are accessible. I still don't have a fix for this.

This product should not be purchased or installed by anyone.

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Fixed the USB thumbnail drive problem finally,

See ATIH 2012 uninstalled - now cannot access any USB thumbnail drives | Knowledge Base

The uninstaller left behind a LOT of garbage including drivers. The cleanup utility referenced in that support thread also left behind a lot of registry entries.

Once I tracked down and deleted ALL of them, I rebooted, plugged in my USB thumbnail drive, it indicated that it was installing required drivers, and this time - finally - it succeeded.