Acronis revises survey results about backup habits
Acronis True Image backup software.
(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)After I blogged about how Acronis misinterpreted its survey data, mistakenly reporting an alarming 87 percent of users back up their data only once every two or three months, the company released a revised report on the matter on Thursday.
The new report shows that nearly two-thirds (64 percent, as opposed to the earlier contention of 87 percent) of users back up their computers every two or three months, which is still much less frequently than is recommended to keep data safe.
In addition, the survey found that 80 percent of the some 6,100 participants surveyed in North America have experienced data loss or recovery of some sort.
The survey suggests that most of us need to take backup more seriously, and do it on a much more frequent basis. This is especially important considering the increasing risk of malware to computers, which often store critical data, such as financial and personal information.
The survey also found that 81 percent of users have had to reinstall their computers' operating systems or software applications. According to the survey, data loss cost those affected significant time and effort, with 48 percent of those surveyed reporting that the reinstallation process took more than four hours on average.
Personally, I don't know how credible these numbers are considering the error found in the previous report. Nonetheless, I can't stress how important backing up is. I've seen many friends learn this lesson the hardest and most expensive way.
Apart from Acronis True Image--which is one of my favorite backup programs, because of its capability to automatically create an exact copy of the hard disk and allow you to restore the entire machine--you can also use other free programs, such as GFI Back Up Home Edition. Or just get an external hard drive and simply copying information over.
Think of backing up as automobile insurance: it's a hassle to have and you hope you'll never have to use it, but it's really dangerous and sort of irresponsible to go without it.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
The services referred to start with your Windows installation and run in the background. The recovery partition has it's own OS separate from your main Windows installation, and does not rely on any of the files contained there-in.
The tech support is one of the worse. They respond to your email anywhere from 1 to 3 days, and they only respond once a day. It takes about 20 messages to just to get them to get the problem.
They don?t share majority of the information collected with the other Techs, So you constantly have to run the same checks.
They constantly send an email asking for where the requested data is that has been sent to them. Then you forward the old mail several times just for nothing to happen.
They have several times said the engineers have a fix and the fix will be in the next update 6 months latter. So you have to argue with them for 2 months on how could they say its fix and hasn?t been verified us to see if it did work.
EVERYTIME their fix hadn?t fix anything. So if you don?t argue for the 2 months with them to get a copy of the fix. You will have waited 6 months to start the process over because they close the ticket as soon as the engineers say they have the fix before it is verified that it did fix the problem.
Stay away form this company.. out contract will so be over. Thanks for small favors. Lots of money my company has wasted.
Stay away
Prior to this innovation (introduced by Powerquest in the form of their "v2i" technology, not long before Symantec bought them), in order to do an image backup you had to boot into a separate OS environment in order to do an image backup of partitions while the primary OS wasn't running.
Yes, I remember when PowerQuest made that mod, it put them right at the front of the imaging programs :) The old PQ saved me more than once. Then Norton bought them and I don't like Ghost.
So I use Acronis True Image and it simply WORKS and does so VERY fast, too :) They offer a FREE version of True Image on the Seagate site called DiskWizard. Its only problem is the lack of scheduling ability, otherwise it is identical!
Macrium Reflect is also FREE and does have scheduling built in, and is just as fast as Acronis. You might need to build a BART PE CD for recovery but they give good instructions on the Macrium site. The included help with the program is insufficient for building the Bart disc, however.
Despite their lower level of protection, Mozy and Carbonite are coming on strong, perhaps already outselling Acronis.
Another new entrant , Rebit, (http://www.rebit.com) provides all the protection of Acronis but no scheduling or configuring, and is finding favor among VARS who want their customers to be protected from catastrophic failure.
With these recent changes, perhaps future survey results will show improvement.