A TRUE Nightmare. (Acronis True Image Home 11)

Member Name: boredindunoon

Product:	Acronis True Image Home 11
Date:	05/02/09 (220 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One Good Feature "Try and Decide"

Disadvantages: Very Poor Installation. Couldn't See My Second Hard Drive, Some Features Don't Work.

Acronis True Image 11 is a disc imaging software package that's designed with the noble aim of backing up the contents of your computer. From photographs and music files, to actual applications and emails, True Image claims to do it all easily and quickly, while also giving you peace of mind.

As well as providing a backup solution for pretty much everything you can think off including any user settings you may have, the software gives you the ability to roll back an installation of software that's causing problems (for example a game you've installed). Include in the software are security and privacy tools that clean up your computer and erase your tracks such as cookies.

Sounds like a dream doesn't it?

Sadly it was more like a nightmare.

Installing the software on my computer with Window Vista (64-bit) couldn't have been more difficult. It took four attempts between complete freeze up's and error messages. When the software finally installed, it couldn't see my second internal hard drive (which is identical to my master drive in brand, capacity, and specifications.) No matter what I attempted the software refused to believe it's existence. I wasn't the greatest failing, there isn't much on that hard drive so I was willing to let it pass. However my problems with the software were just getting started. Included in the software are some security and privacy tools that did absolutely nothing on my computer. They said they were doing something such as deleting history in Internet Explorer, but when I checked the history would still be there. The so called File Shredder is less useful than a empty swimming pool (metaphors were never my strong point) it doesn't even delete the files that it's meant to be making 'unrecoverable' from your desktop.

The software interface isn't the easiest to understand nor use, and can be tricky to confirm backups the way that you want.

Three days after installing True Image I switched on my computer to be bombarded with a number of error messages along the lines of "File Not Found" it didn't take me long to work out that the software had somehow become corrupt. I attempted to do a repair installation without much luck, so I had to do a system restore to remove the software (ironic considering that's what this software was designed to do) followed by a registry clean up, and finally a complete fresh installation of the software (which only took two attempts this time around). However it didn't solve any of my problems.

I did consider the possibility that it was me that was doing something wrong, or something on my computer such as Ghost Surf for example was interfering with the software so I decided to email their technical support and detailed the problems that I was having. That was more than two weeks ago and I'm still waiting on a replay.

I did like the "try and decide" option, which is a software safeguard that allows you to try new or potentially damaging software out on your computer while giving you the option to discard any changes at any time. This worked well and I found it especially useful because I still tend to play a lot of older computer games such as Star Craft or Cyber Storm. Such games can cause problems when you have to start playing around with system settings, and in some cases installing emulators, but you can try them out risk free.

The software claims to be Vista compatible, but with so many problems it's hard to imagine it being any more difficult or useless. Maybe despite the fact that my computer works perfectly it just didn't like something I was running in the back ground. For all I know it could have been my Internet Security Suite that was causing some of the problems but I personally doubt it. Without a replay from Technical Support there is no way to be sure, if the problems lie within the software or not.

However considering the problems, the time I've spent, and how valuable your computers contents can be, I can't in my right mind recommend this product to you despite it having one useful feature.

I've you're looking for a backup solution then look somewhere else. In the mean time I've reverted to copying and pasting anything I want to back up over to my external hard drive. Not an ideal method but far better and more to the point safer than this.

(I'm a reviewer on Amazon, and some my reviews are copied from there to dooyoo. Please feel free to check out my Amazon profile under my real name of Mr Andrew M Kerr.)

Summary: Thanks For Reading.

Variety of features:
Reliability:
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Installation:
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