Discussion on:

Product Spotlight: Acronis Backup & Recovery 10

How much trouble do back and data recovery routines cause for you? What application do you use to manage it?

Windows Backup costs $0 (aside from Windows itself) and allows you to back up precisely what you want.

This might not be sufficient for servers, but for workstations, it works fine, at no addtional cost whatsoever.

Just set up a network share with sufficient space (1800 GB, in this case) on a machine with any OS (plain Windows 7 Enterprise in this case) and set up Windows Backup for scheduled or manual backups to this share (depending on whether the employee works at the office every day or works from home most of the time). Create shortcuts for Windows Backup on the shortcut and pin it to the taskbar, and you're done...

I used Acronis True Image Echo Workstation with Windows XP to clone my internal hard disk to a hard disk inserted into the Ultrabay slot on my Lenovo T61p. This worked well and provided a very quick, though not perfect, disaster recovery option - just insert the cloned disk and boot from it if the internal fails. When I upgraded to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, True Image Echo workstation would not run (perhaps it will now), so I also upgraded to Backup & Recovery 10 Workstation. The same cloning procedure does not work for me anymore. I have worked with Acronis support for over two months and have yet to have the issue resolved. The last thing that I heard was that cloning to the Ultrabay was not supported. In addition to features not working after the upgrade, some features were removed, such as partition resizing during cloning and when restoring from a disk image. I can't comment on the more traditional uses of B&R 10, but from my disk cloning experience, it falls far short of True Image Echo.

I have True Image Home 2009. I got it on the cheap from NewEgg once. Will backup Linux and MS partitions. I can even take a bare drive, hook it in, and tell it to restore the backup image to the unformatted, unpartitioned disk and it does it all for me.

I guess with the added workstation management, that bigger tool would be better for a bigger IT shop.

But, I'd say go with a less costly version for smaller IT setups.

Acronis Products are great until they don't work and you need support. I recently tried to use Acronis B&R for Small Business Server along with their Exchange Add on. We were hoping to use the product to do a P2V conversion to Hyper-V of an SBS2008 Server. Even with there support people remotely trying to to do this for us the process failed. Then we found that the backups we made using the acronis software prior to this process were corrupted, resulting in data loss. We spent over 24 hours dealing with the most incompetent overseas support people our company has ever dealt with. We begged to be pushed to Tier 2 support in the US, which never happened. After losing a day's worth of Exchange Data, and wasting a HUGE amount of time, we ended up requesting a refund on the product. I've used Acronis Products for over 5 years and will NEVER recommend them again to any of my clients.

Having just posted my own comments without reading what's been written already, I also spent what seemed like most of a weekend struggling with this product before giving up. If you want backups I suggest rather that go for a bare metal everything-gets-saved 'clever' product you just need to save working files and identities, not buy a technically clever and untestable product.
What angered me about my experience was that afterwards. having read all the reviews I realised that all the IT journalists involved had done was just assume that software does what it says on the tin. That could be an enormously expensive mistake in the real world. If you insist on using this or any competing product I suggest you do not discontinue your low-tech backups that save the simple bare necessities of My Docs, Identities etc.

Acronis is an absolute pain. I have experience it quite a few times now. It causes all sorts of problems until you realise you have to increase the stack size.
First time, on my own computer, I was tearing my hair out until I googled the problem & lo...there were lots & lots of listings.
Once increased it works ok but I prefer not to use it. The problem is what to use? Windows backup is rarely backwards compatible.

I'm an I.T. consultant and I also have five Windows PCs at home. Same experience here but I didn't wait until it was an emergency. I did my usual iterations of test restores and found out the "bare metal" (so called, anyway) recovery didn't work. Acronis support and I went back and forth for at least three weeks, then I had to cut them off because they were just wasting my time and we were no closer to resolution than upon first contact. I wasted money on the stoopid product but learned my lesson, ran a full trial of Storagecraft's backup solution, then purchased it. I've had to do many file and full system restores and it works flawlessly. Definitely worth the money, Acronis isn't worth the CD it's distributed on. Bah.

I spent over 100 hours, including 40+ hours with Acronis support, trying to get Backup and Recovery 10 to work consistently. The support experience is the worst I have had with any company in my career. I am an IT Manager at a 1000+ employee company, and we needed a scalable, centrally managed workstation backup solution. Backup and Recovery should not be confused with True Echo, which does work well for individual systems. Backup and Recovery 10 is a failed attempt at entering the mid to large IT market segment. I am now using a cloud backup solution for our workstations at a lower cost and greater flexibility. Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 is a failed product with a broken support model.

Jagibbo,
As a VAR and Acronis reseller, I am very interested in your experience. Unfortunately, it is often the negative experiences that teach us the most.

Were your problems in the area of installation & configuration or usage, or did the product fail to function or put your data at risk?

I too have experienced issues with Acronis support, so I simply pursue Acronis technical education for my staff, and support my customers directly. Our experience has been that you need an advanced background to be able to specify & configure the full Acronis Server suite. It may not be worth it for the end user like yourself, but shielded from these issues by a knowledgable VAR, my customers get great value from Acronis.

I agree. Acronis provides tremendous value for our clients. However, that doesn't mean you can just click an executable file, follow a few default prompts and consider the job complete and not monitor the operation. We have technicians monitor Acronis jobs daily, but the value is tremendous, especially when recovering from complete server failures to new chasses in just 90 minutes to two or so hours.

I used an earlier version of this product a couple of years ago and it didn't work, despite getting great reviews in various magazines I'd been reading. The problem with this and other similar products is that you never get the chance to actually test them because no-one is going to lead them back into a 'bare metal' PC unless the PC in question is not a working PC but one bought just as a test gig.

Erik,
Shame on you for recommending a product critical to the wellbeing of users' computers with only the most cursory examination. Did you actually try this program? Conceptually, it is fine. In practice, it is a bug ridden piece of detrious. Don't believe me, take a quick look at the comments of hundreds (nay thousands) of happy former Acronis customers posted on Actonis forums. In addition to the fact that QA is an unknown commodity at the vendor, support (which terminates 30 days after they get your money) is almost nonexistant. As a former customer of Acronis, I strongly recommend that you walk (or better yet, run) away from this product as quickly as you can.

I assume one of the lesser versions Acronis Backup [say the Workstation edition] can be used for a standard backup of local data and a couple of other systems' data as well.