Comments on: Acronis revises survey results about backup habits

Acronis released a revised report on its survey about users' backup habit.

[kr3bstar]

After all of these years, I'm troubled by the fact that acronis trueimage home STILL requires services to load at boot time even if you don't use its scheduler. The acronis services themselves are probably minimal, but when added to qttask, ituneshelper, jusched, roxio/nero and all of the other bloatware on a typical home user's system, applications like this undoutedly cause a slower bootup and login process. If I'm not specifically running an application then I strongly believe that it shouldn't load at boot time. Down with bloatware!

[ngodong]

I agree on this notion. Normally I disable these services and manually make backups regularly, but that's because I remember to do so. If you are forgetful, it's necessary to have those services running in the background.

[ikramerica--2008]

Isn't this so that you can boot into Acronis Home if you need to?

[kr3bstar]

I don't think so. You can boot directly into it from bootable media.

[ikramerica--2008]

But it also can create a boot partition on your main disk. And the boot services are needed for that. Are you sure they don't turn off after the "press F11 to start Acronis Home" (I think it's F11) passes?

[tauvix]

The boot services have nothing to do with the recovery partition that Acronis can create.

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.

[rodney_williams]

I have been using several versions of the Acronis products for a few yeare most of all their Snap deploy product. I work for a company that does training. My job is to issue laptops to the new students when they start. I use Snap deploy to put clean Images on the laptops to ensure that there are no problems. This product is supposed to change the IP address on the computers when I image them. It does NOT!!! It also deletes the network profile as well. So every time I have to manually change the IP then add my network settings. Their Tech support has been working this issue for over a year with little to no help to me. My advice to all USE ANOTHER PRODUCT!!!!

[Ben_O]

We been using several different version of Acronis. We have been trying for 3 years to get problems fix to be able to use the program properly.

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

[pjk0]

If I'm not mistaken, most modern "image" backup applications run background services to facilitate doing a "live" backup of a partition while the OS is running and technically the partition is in-use and active.

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.

[Todd Sauve]

pjk0,

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.

[nortonewart]

I believe Acronis' survey results - many unsophisticated computer users find the scheduling and configuration tasks of Acronis overwhelming, and end up avoiding backing up.

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.

[youtubelin]

yes i have used this backup and not love