Rating: 
Summary: ...
Review: ... The product worked, but it is under documented, written in broken english and makes false promises.
YOU MUST HAVE UDF PACKET WRITING SOFTWARE INSTALLED IN YOUR SYSTEM. This means that unless you want to pay Extra for Roxios Easy cd/dvd Creator or Nero with InCd this product is useless if you want to burn a disc for back up...
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Features
Review: Acronis True Image 6.0 delivers outstanding features at a surprisingly low price. True Image's ability to write to recordable DVDs and its image creation of system disks within Windows will tip the scale for some. But if you're looking for scheduling features, partition creation, and disk-to-disk copying, stick with PowerQuest Drive Image.
Rating:
Summary: Crashed my computer
Review: After unsuccessful attempts to upgrade my hard drive with Drive Image 7, I bought True Image 6.0. My first upgrade attempt was successful. It works great.
Rating:
Summary: Works nice with XP
Review: After unsuccessful attempts to upgrade my hard drive with Drive Image 7, I bought True Image 6.0. My first upgrade attempt was successful. It works great.
Rating: 
Summary: Bad for personal backups: poor feature set, limited support
Review: I bought this product and returned it two weeks later. I will give Acronis credit for having a no-questions-asked 30-Day refund policy.Here are my reasons (copied from a support forum I posted to): I consider myself burned because I trusted PC Magazine's high rating of this product too much and have been extremely disappointed as a result. Instead of investing time to find some reasonable open-source alternative or to make sure all the features I expected were present and functional, I just ponied up the $50 (or whatever) to buy TI version 7.0. Mistake, so far. Here are my complaints:
1. No partial backup/filtering feature. Foolishly, I assumed that the software would give me the flexibility to mark portions of the filesystem to be included in the backup. No dice. I understand that Acronis considers entire-disk backup/cloning/restoration to be their sweet spot, but the lack of this feature makes the software far less attractive to the home user, in my opinion.
2. Massive size of incremental backup images! After an initial full backup that was 13 GB big, I hoped for daily incremental backups that were in the tens of MB range. No! Instead, I get seemingly random sizes anywhere between 100 MB and 1 GB (so far). At first, I thought I could rectify this by taking point 1 above into consideration. So, I moved everything within reason off of my target partition (including, laboriously, Documents and Settings, in an effort to avoid things like my browser caches) and made sure that the partition Windows lives on is no longer included in the backup. The result? Slightly smaller file sizes, but not much. I'm still anywhere between 100 and 500 MB every night. Obviously no good for nightly "incremental" backups.
3. Support. First I was disappointed because the only FAQ or support info Acronis offers is entirely pre-sales focused. Sorry, Acronis, but it's really worthless from a post-sales perspective! The manual is OK, but it's long on peripheral info (do we really need another source of information on disk partition structure?) and short on real rubber-meets-road usage information. To top this off, I formally wrote a support request to Acronis tech support on 6/7 and finally received a reply over one week later. By then, I had already figured out everything except the file size issue, and the answer I received did nothing more than restate the "sectors, not files" point I've already read here a bunch of times. I would suggest a formal KnowledgeBase (an honest Support FAQ instead of a Marketing FAQ) to house some of these more frequent "answers," instead of relying on 1-1 e-mail or this forum. My situation is simple: I have a large second hard drive and I want nightly incremental backups of my primary drive written there. Surely that is a common need? If I really have 500 MB worth of sector changes happening in one day's time, then I don't think that sector-based incremental backup is a very good approach for the product to take. It's not really very incremental, is it, when the "increments" represent massive chunks of the hard drive? I made my own bed here by not doing more homework, but I honestly would like to ditch the product and get my money back at this point. I suppose I'll try to call and make this request, but I don't have high expectations. I am 100% confident that there are many other superior choices out there at this time--and probably some of them free to boot. To demonstrate that I have some sense of balance here, I will say that this is probably a good product for basic users, in the sense that the UI is friendly. However, I would imagine that even basic users would benefit greatly from a filtering feature. And who wouldn't want the smallest files possible when doing incremental backups?
Rating:
Summary: Bad for personal backups: poor feature set, limited support
Review: I bought this product and returned it two weeks later. I will give Acronis credit for having a no-questions-asked 30-Day refund policy. Here are my reasons (copied from a support forum I posted to): I consider myself burned because I trusted PC Magazine's high rating of this product too much and have been extremely disappointed as a result. Instead of investing time to find some reasonable open-source alternative or to make sure all the features I expected were present and functional, I just ponied up the $50 (or whatever) to buy TI version 7.0. Mistake, so far. Here are my complaints:
1. No partial backup/filtering feature. Foolishly, I assumed that the software would give me the flexibility to mark portions of the filesystem to be included in the backup. No dice. I understand that Acronis considers entire-disk backup/cloning/restoration to be their sweet spot, but the lack of this feature makes the software far less attractive to the home user, in my opinion.
2. Massive size of incremental backup images! After an initial full backup that was 13 GB big, I hoped for daily incremental backups that were in the tens of MB range. No! Instead, I get seemingly random sizes anywhere between 100 MB and 1 GB (so far). At first, I thought I could rectify this by taking point 1 above into consideration. So, I moved everything within reason off of my target partition (including, laboriously, Documents and Settings, in an effort to avoid things like my browser caches) and made sure that the partition Windows lives on is no longer included in the backup. The result? Slightly smaller file sizes, but not much. I'm still anywhere between 100 and 500 MB every night. Obviously no good for nightly "incremental" backups.
3. Support. First I was disappointed because the only FAQ or support info Acronis offers is entirely pre-sales focused. Sorry, Acronis, but it's really worthless from a post-sales perspective! The manual is OK, but it's long on peripheral info (do we really need another source of information on disk partition structure?) and short on real rubber-meets-road usage information. To top this off, I formally wrote a support request to Acronis tech support on 6/7 and finally received a reply over one week later. By then, I had already figured out everything except the file size issue, and the answer I received did nothing more than restate the "sectors, not files" point I've already read here a bunch of times. I would suggest a formal KnowledgeBase (an honest Support FAQ instead of a Marketing FAQ) to house some of these more frequent "answers," instead of relying on 1-1 e-mail or this forum. My situation is simple: I have a large second hard drive and I want nightly incremental backups of my primary drive written there. Surely that is a common need? If I really have 500 MB worth of sector changes happening in one day's time, then I don't think that sector-based incremental backup is a very good approach for the product to take. It's not really very incremental, is it, when the "increments" represent massive chunks of the hard drive? I made my own bed here by not doing more homework, but I honestly would like to ditch the product and get my money back at this point. I suppose I'll try to call and make this request, but I don't have high expectations. I am 100% confident that there are many other superior choices out there at this time--and probably some of them free to boot. To demonstrate that I have some sense of balance here, I will say that this is probably a good product for basic users, in the sense that the UI is friendly. However, I would imagine that even basic users would benefit greatly from a filtering feature. And who wouldn't want the smallest files possible when doing incremental backups?
Rating:
Summary: Many Quirks
Review: I bought this product on the basis of its high user ratings. But I found many quirks that get in the way of it performing its simple tasks. The software, its documentation, and Acronis's website don't answer some obvious questions. What's worse is that there is no telephone support for installation and first use, with a tepid promise of an e-mail tech support response in 48 hours. Here are some of the many quirks that put stumbling blocks in the way of easy use: 1) Right out of the box, the serial number isn't on the diskette envelope but gets lost in a collection of papers including advertising and a slim user manual that has no alphabetized subject index. The serial number location is not revealed in any versions of the product manual or help functions. I stumbled across it and was finally able to install it. 2) Online registration didn't "take" when I didn't fill out one field. I selected Back to re-enter the information and got an error message that my serial number had already been registered. Then I received an e-mail notice that registration was successful. 3) I then attempted to create a disk image on an HP CD-Writer, formatting disks with the lite version of EasyCDCreator 5.0. Acronis cranked for 20 minutes, acting as if it were recording the image on the disk. Then it spit out the disk with an error message that my media may be faulty. I was able to record a file on the same disk using Windows Explorer. But, there is nothing in any of the documentation to tell the user what type of disk format is required. So, I tried this with both CD-R and CD-RW, with no luck. An e-mail to tech support was answered the next day with the suggestion that I insert a blank disk. I did that, but the product didn't recognize an unformatted disk. 4) I finally used the Acronis Rescue Media Builder to create a disk. However Media Builder must be restarted after formatting each disk, even though 7 are required for my disk image. It now seems to be working, but this shouldn't be so hard! 4) The documentation has many grammatical errors that read as if it has never been gone over by a technical writer. If the company allows this many errors in functionality and documentation, how clean is their code? Can I count on it working if my hard drive crashes? When I shell out [$$$]for utility software, I want and expect documentation and functionality that makes it easy to use. I expect the standard telephone support and comprehensive online troubleshooting guides offered by other software manufacturers. This product has the look and feel of a beta test, not version 6.0.
Rating:
Summary: It either works -- or it doesn't. Make sure to TEST!!!
Review: I have two complete sets of image CDs for my system burned on two different burners (and verified) on two different brands of media. My XP system got hosed-up (lsass.exe issue) and I figured I'd break out the old DI6 boot CD and just re-image. Surprise, it can read the last CD in order to select that archive to restore from, but it can't read either CD1 and justs posts an error that the media may be of poor quality. In addition, it reset the hard drive partition (all is lost) prior to ever checking to see if you had media and that it was readable. So now, you can't try to just re-install XP, you have to format and rebuild from scratch.
Rating:
Summary: It either works -- or it doesn't. Make sure to TEST!!!
Review: I have two complete sets of image CDs for my system burned on two different burners (and verified) on two different brands of media. My XP system got hosed-up (lsass.exe issue) and I figured I'd break out the old DI6 boot CD and just re-image. Surprise, it can read the last CD in order to select that archive to restore from, but it can't read either CD1 and justs posts an error that the media may be of poor quality. In addition, it reset the hard drive partition (all is lost) prior to ever checking to see if you had media and that it was readable. So now, you can't try to just re-install XP, you have to format and rebuild from scratch.
Rating:
Summary: Restores your PC like Magic!
Review: I looked at all the popular image software and even some not so popular that are available on the web. This software gave me more bang for the buck with my Win98 OS and is rated favorably by software evalution sites. I'm a novice computer user and I've created and restored images of my entire hard drive several times while resolving an unrelated software problem. I can create an image to another hard drive in my computer, to an external hard drive or to my wifes pc which is connected to mine through a network cable. I haven't created images to CD's though. I've had no problems, the software is very easy to use and straight forward. What a relief it is to know you won't ever have to reinstall all your programs again and that your important pictures and files are safe! There's also a 30 day money back guaranty, -see their website. My PC is a PIII 500mhz, Win98SE with 3- Western Digital hard drives: 2-40G & 1-80G external. Full disclosure: I know this review sounds suspiciously rosy compared to some others, I'm not a company cheerleader just a blue collar worker bee from Long Beach. I have no problem condemning things that don't work.
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