Acronis True Image

So I really like Acronis True Image, not just because it's a solid backup tool, but it just works! I've tried a few disk imagers, many of which have issues re-imaging a machine that's different hardware or otherwise incompatible in the slightest. Not impressed when this happens as honestly it's a huge annoyance that the disk image can't detect that I have a better hard drive.

True Image just works, whether I have different hardware or the same. Some people will say it's not worth the price but if you're going to be doing backups and replacing hardware over time it's in my opinion the best tool. Other disk imagers are fine but they likely can't do this, or at least not as well.

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]