Acronis True Image

Has anyone here installed the latest update for Acronis True Image? It has renamed the product as Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office. Half the stuff does not seem to work, it spent over two hours securely deleting some files and it looks like it has now lost all the backups.

Will system restore get the old version of True Image back again?

It seems to have gone down the same route as Norton - full of bloatware.

My subscription is about to expire anyway. What would the group recommend as a backup instead of Acronis?

Drive Snapshot, I have used it for years.

I use Macrium Reflect, easy no fuss image copy aid.

Macrium Reflect. Been using it for many years and never a problem. Very simple and easy to use.

If you look on their forums there are many complaints about previous versions from the past couple of years having some of the same buggy facilities and people only realising that when they actually need to recover information that Acronis fails in that respect as well.

I found that the 2021 version of Acronis (before the renaming) seriously slowed down my startup (another common complaint in their forums) and even disabling the "protection" features made no difference.

IMO Acronis has jumped the shark and I would not touch it with a barge pole. However, many review sites still recommend Acronis as the best backup software so it makes you wonder about the rest of their recommendations.

I use Macrium Reflect 8 Home Edition

Previously I had used Acronis, but it had a number of fundamental shortcomings, which the company showed no signs of addressing in subsequent releases, and needed frequent manual intervention.

Reflect has been OK, and is very configurable. I have it set up to email me confirmations of each backup.

Chris

I could never use it as it used its own operating system which it ran under so no blind access at all as no speech. I merely use the built in Microsoft one to a removable hard drive once a week. Brian

(I have no connection with Macrium apart from being a customer)

On Fri, 10 Sep 2021 11:35:21 +0100, Allan snipped-for-privacy@invalid.invalid wrote: [snip

Thanks everyone for their comments. After a major struggle - including system restore not working because of a missing file - I have now successfully reinstated True Image 2020 to allow me to create an emergency backup now and (I hope) giving me access to the earlier ones.

The subscription soon ends anyway so it looks like Macrium is now in pole position.

Maybe one of those Acronis forum posts was me. I'd been most versions since around 2009, but had become a bit fed up with the bloated "cyber prtection" and the switch from perpetual to annual licencing. The final straw was finding that, even though backups ran fine, verified, and I could restore the whole system, attempting to restoring individual files didn't work.

I switched to Macrium Reflect several months ago and it's fine. (A British company too).

What group? For backup - AOMEI Backupper.

Use the limited function Acronis version offered free by your main drive's manufacturer?

PA

I've never seen Acronis in any form bundled with any hard drive I have purchased, nor seen it installed on any computer I have bought.

Removing Acronis 2020 from my machine speeded up the startup and first use of programs considerably.

Go to the drive's manufacturer's website.

PA

Western Digital seems to be offering the bloated version as the current version.

Perhaps this is an older version, with slightly less bloat.

SHA1: EC412DDE451459D89CD7B19AFE69F80682A6D2E1

It's harder to find the older WDC version ones. At least you can see the modern file name, versus the older tih_s_e naming convention.

SHA1: 9249BBA603C496503B7A92948A3BEC4E8535D7DE

Whereas current versions might be 800MB.

One of the problems, is not going back too far, and having trouble doing a hot backup of a Windows 10 C: . That's why I didn't go back further in time and avoid the modern ones.

The only older ones I have on disk here, are stuff like this from 2012.

Name: DiscWizardSetup-14387.en.exe Size: 151,264,056 bytes (144 MB)

SHA1: 6B9F2269CEB78FCE0E74B4C6E6E927B4F3E4480D

and

Name: tih_s_e_14192__westerndigtialversion_discWizard.exe Size: 155,165,184 bytes (147 MB)

SHA1: C2EE42B8991742B65639623044938693574529BD

The download now, is big enough to be a video game.

And you don't have to use those, as there are other free materials out there from other companies.

Paul

Incidentally - IME you don't strictly need the right version for your particular HD manufacturer. Just temporarily attaching an HD drive from one of the manufacturers that do a free Acronis is enough to give the software access to the drive you want to back up.

PA

You get the choice of creating either a Linux-based bootable recovery disk or Windows-based WinPE/WinRE.