Acronis True Image

Looking at some of the pervious reviews I would have to add my agreement with how bad True Image has become. Not only is the software slow, buggy and crash prone they have started a forced subscription model just to keep your current version working. This is Totally greed on the part of the companies part. I could understand a subscription if your were using their cloud back-up system but making forced subscriptions for local copies not only makes no sense it seems criminal! Steer far away from this product the best thing the company has going for it is a marketing.

I have been running Acronis True Image for about a year. I purchased multiple multi-computer licenses. In the one case where I needed to recover a system due to a lightening strike blowing a mother board, I found the recovery process too complicated and time consuming.

Today I applied the July 2018 Windows 10 security roll-up update to one machine. Upon reboot Acronis reported that I had exceeded the maximum number of activations for the license key. it then offered a number of options to resolve the problem, including "I reinstalled Windows". I tried this option which required me entering account information which I did not have on hand at the time. Since I needed to get the system running, I used another license key that had a few activations left. That worked and all is ok.

Later I logged on to my Acronis account to discover there is absolutely no way to see a list of machines using a given license key. In fact, you can't even see how many activations have been used for a key.

I opened a chat with customer support who basically told me what I had already found. THEY know how many activations there are against each license but they aren't willing to make that information available to the customer or to allow the customer to centrally manage licenses. They just want to up-sell to more licenses and they cloud back-up service.

So, my take away is that Acronis cares more about preventing someone from using their precious software without buying a license than they do about supporting customers that have purchased bulk licenses.

Frankly, I'm looking for another solution which brought me to this article.

I have been using Acronis True Image since the demise (take over by Symantec) of Drive Image (that's well over 10 years).

Drive Image (Powerquest) was the goto disk cloning software (just as Partition Magic was the partitioning tool of choice) until its purchase by Symantec.

Although, we could have gone to Ghost (largely rewritten using the PQ code), most of us had a bad experience with Ghost. Symantec made a mistake and instead of issuing DI as Ghost 9. Should have released it as Drive Image.

So many of us switched to Acronis True Image. This software was not nearly as useable as Drive Image but was superior to Ghost.

The primary (only) use of this software, back then, was to create disk images to assist in the building of standardised PC setups, and to create a back up of a working system (note data files were backed up separately - often using zip file storage (zip archives were and are ubiquitous, most back up software had proprietary file formats which sometimes made restoration difficult if your PC with the backup software wouldn't boot).

Since then, Acronis have bloated what was a simple piece of software and engaged in feature creep, so now not only is TrueImage, not a TrueImage but incorporates back up functionality (I nearly said Full Backup functionality), ransomware protection and cloud features and storage.

I'll say first of all that the Cloud storage (for back ups and archiving) was initially a great feature and provided a useful and fit for purpose functionality. That, however, was with the unlimited subscription.

The unlimited subscription has been terminated as of January 2019. Acronis of course are just the latest in a long line of suppliers to cease unlimited storage.

I contacted Acronis support to find out about transferring my existing back ups to another storage supplier (or downloading it to my own storage), I was told that I would have to restore the data and couldn't transfer it to different storage otherwise.

I later found out that this was incorrect as all backups can be downloaded from the Cloud storage area. The method provided is not really that good as the files are downloaded in a zip file. Once downloaded this way they are pretty useless, as depending on the backup size (e.g. a full back up of C & D drives on my main PC is about 3Tb), zip needs at least the size of the back up on the C: drive in order to unzip files. What would really be required is a way to download the mountable .tib archive file, so far I have been unable to find a way to do this (and Acronis support says you can't).

Anyway against my better judgement I got a new subscription with a reduced 1Tb of storage space. The maximum storage you can now purchase is 5Tb, this at a price that is more than double my previous 'Unlimited' subscription. And is more than the cost of a 5Tb HDD.

It seems to me that none of this solutions are now actually fit for purpose. The average PC drive is now in excess of 1Tb (My main Laptop has 4Tb (75% full), My kids each have 2Tb, and my desktop has 6Tb, I'll ignore mobile devices as they come with their own backup on Google drive or Samsung), with a 1Tb storage you cannot image the whole drive more than once, which means that you can only keep minor incremental back ups in the cloud. Particularly with a 5 device licence.

As far as the software goes, it still produces whole disk images, but is supposedly a full back up suite. You can schedule backups but you cannot create back up policies, if you schedule a backup it will overwrite the file each time, so if for example you want monthly whole drive images you have to create new backups each time. If you want to create monthly full back ups with weekly incrementals, on six month rotation you have to create a minimum of 36 schedule events. Worse still if you want to create weekly fulls and daily incrementals.

The standalone version is still ok at providing disk images and still provides the same functionality. As a back up suite on subscription, Acronis is pretty poor and inflexible. It was worth it with unlimited cloud storage but without is Unfit for Purpose, there are better products on the market (SyncBack Pro is a better back up software).

[Edited by M0d3rn15t, December 10]

[Edited by M0d3rn15t, December 10]

Works fine for me. I use it for system image backups. Never failed. I would only like to disable all the unnecessary services running in the background.

I lost some files because the FTP upload for one of the volumes failed. Acronis didn't warn that the FTP upload failed at all and said that the back-up was successful.

Some people commented on this application stating that it "is bugged", "has gotten worse", "latest versions don't work" etc.
What are these problems? I haven't used Acronis often but it seems to me the newer versions are offering better support in VMs.

Does it fail to backup? Does it make corrupt backup files?

As a long time user of Acronis, the latest versions became terrible. So terrible that I had no trust in it for my computer backups. In the search for a successor I stumbled on Macrium Reflect. It's a great software and so much easier than Acronis True Image. Definitely recommended! You will find it on AlternativeTo.net

supports Incremental, Cloud, Scheduled backup, has Good UI, and supports Live CD but it is commercial

Acronis True Image money skimmer.
After having stopped using Acrornis True Image a more than year ago due to their continued method of "forced" upgrade to use the software and the depreciation of users trying to use internal storage. [ I use a in-house Synology 7819 Disk-station NAS]. I received an auto email from my PayPal account (Date May 15 2019).

Cleverbridge Inc.
844-376-1734 Instructions to merchant

Description Unit price Qty Amount
Acronis True Image Subscription - 3 Computers, 1 Year - #176140448
$76.29 USD 1 $76.29 USD
Subtotal $76.29 USD
Total $76.29 USD
Payment $76.29 USD
charge will appear on your credit card statement as "PAYPAL *CLEVERBRIDG"
. Even if you no longer use the software and do not purchase the upgrade yourself. IT SEEMS THAT ACRONIS WILL JUST DO IT FOR YOU!

Several times crashed and didn't see drive C. Eventually nothing helped to get it working, just simply don't see drive c:, so uninstalled.

OS: Windows 10 Ent with all updates.

Whatever you do, don't use Acronis True Image at least not on the Mac. Backing up to the cloud works fine with a desktop app. But recovering files is awful. You have to login at least 3 times via redirects on Safari. Then the download happens through Safari. I was not able to get it to work with a decent download manager like leech. Downloads keep getting timed out, and won't resume even though I have a static ip on my local network. So I am having to go through the directory tree and download it folder by folder. PITA.

Acronis 2016 crashed upon my very first restore attempt of an XP machine. In other words, IT DOES NOT PROTECT YOU WITH A BACKUP which is the only reason the product exists. Jesus Christ.

The box LIES. Do not buy this for an XP machine.

Then again, most I.T. people mock anyone using XP (since they don't understand what productivity is, namely with regard to interface), so good luck being taken seriously with this complaint.

Note - your mileage may vary. I have a very very vanilla 2003 Compaq Presario, 200G drive, Maybe in the 10 minutes that Acronis spent testing True Image 2016 on XP, they assembled a configuration that it actually works on. So YMMV.

Many of the big name backup software providers are offering cloud backups, but only if you use their cloud storage. On top of that, there aren't any worthwhile features being added. There's no archive option, no sync option between personal devices, no failsafe for laptop backups to stop/resume as necessary and move data to intended location once connection resumes.

A few years ago I run through comparison websites and saw so many times that Acronis True Image was supposed to be the best. Indeed, there are many usefull features that I could hardly find on other software. So I bought it, and regretted.
I faced so many bugs, more or less important, that I definitively decided to find an other software. Many thanks to alternativeTo, which made me discover and compare many software, and finally choose AOMEI Backupper. It is clean and efficient. The support team answers. The only drawback is the linux boot tool which works badly, but the Windows PE is great.
Back to Acronis TI : for some bugs I contacted the support team (I don't remember why, it's too far) and won a free upgrade. But I still face problems like unable to load an image, or very long processes, or windows that don't feet my screen, etc. I'm very disappointed.

[Edited by renArD, February 06]