Newegg is offering up Acronis Home 2011 for $20 over the cost of a HDD as a combo special. That's about half the price of buying it off the Acronis website. But Acronis is a horrible company and I've heard horror stories. I've also heard good things about them from enterprise IT people who probably have the biggest version they make. The horror stories I have heard are that the backups run fine but if you ever need to restore or rely on those backups, they extort money from you saying your "subscription" or license has expired or that your version does not include that feature. The worst part of this is that if you can't get online and do a transaction, you're dead in the water. That is the antithesis of the whole concept of having backups in the first place. They don't answer their phone and their website, like most, is an absolute piece of fucking shit. I'm sure it's by design to extort money; that's why they, like anyone else, are in business. Does anyone know what version of what does what with respect to this Acronic company?
I bought the software in a box, at a retail store. It includes the installation disc WHICH IS ALSO A RESCUE DISC. I kept this disc. A year later when a hard drive imploded (click of death), I bought a replacement hard drive, installed it into the computer, booted off the Acronis install / rescue disc, ran Acronis restore from there, and completely restored my entire disc contents from backup in one hour. Booted off the new hard drive, good to go. It may be significant that I always perform "Full" backups (rather than "Incremental"). With standard compression I can store about 20 Full backups on my backup media (USB external drive). I also use Casper and Mozy for redundant redundancy i.e. cheap insurance.
I always have problems. I always get those error messages when backup starts "failed to read sector" etc. I am looking for a better solution. Very dissatisfied with this product.
i use acronis but only through the bootable cd that is made with the full progam. most hdd companies have a free download of acronis that works with their hdd. it has always worked well for me, one failure to restore a system in nearly 10 years of use that i can recall. fucking idiots usually have horror stories to tell.
I have a similar story except that I bought disk online. I have both versions 9 and 10 (for WinXP and Win7). I only do full backups, and I have done full restores a couple times, plus numerous partial restores. I like the product a lot.
I've used Acronis for years and currently have Version 11 to run on both XP and W7 rigs. It has sometimes been an issue to "restore image" from the desktop, so I no longer bother. When I restore an image, I do it from the boot CD which you can burn.. it has always worked perfectly.
I'm looking to mirror the OS drive on another drive. Any reason to think that won't work with this home version?
My understanding of drive mirroring is that a second drive is a continually updated copy of the first. You will need RAID for that. If what you want is a drive clone, you can do that with True Image backup and restore. If you're doing that more than once, you might look at Migrate Easy, also by Acronis.
Forget Acronis, or any commercial backup software for that matter. There are plenty of opensource alternatives that are better, more stable and won't hold your data hostage if you have to do a restore: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ http://www.bacula.org/en/ http://www.clonezilla.org/
If you do not use RAID, the best solution by far is to just clone your drive to a mirror drive once a week. The use Acronis or some backup software to do incremental backups to DVD every night during the week. If your drive ever fails you can be back up and running in 15 minutes. This method has saved me a number of times with almost no hassle. 1. Acronis or any of the free cloning software that comes with your drive will work fine for the cloning. 2. Acronis or any reliable backup software can be used to make one base backup and the subsequent incremental backups. With the price of hard drives nowadays, there is no reason to use disc images for backups.