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Acronis charging customers for bug fixes

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mwang:
Update:

After the new build (of TI 10) failed to address the bugs I reported, Acronis tech support asked me to test ver. 11 trial (downloaded from the web site). The result: most of the issues remained. So ver. 11 isn't exactly Vista ready after all.

mwb1100:
I've used BootIt NG (BING) for years. It's a great tool. Only shortcomings: can't do imaging in Windows and no incremental backup. But it's always been perfectly reliable, and it's also (I should say it's mainly) a multi-boot manager.
-mwang (September 27, 2007, 04:45 AM)
--- End quote ---
I haven't used BootIt NG, but I've used its sibling, Image for Windows (I4W).   TeraByte has a free add-on driver that enables I4W to backup within windows; I don't know whether that would apply to BING or not.

One area that I had a better experience with Acronis over I4W is performing a bare-metal restore of an image.  I4W's boot disk seems to be a version of Linux that's supposed to do the restore.  I had major difficulties getting that environment to recognize all the devices I needed to do the restore.  I can't remember the details, but it was something like not recognizing the SATA drive I wanted to restore the image to or not recognizing the USB drive that held the image.

The Acronis boot disk also boots some version of Linux (I think), but it loads up a program that has a virtually identical interface to the Windows program, and recognized my devices just fine.

It's unfortunate that the situation with boot disks can be so iffy - I'm sure that for many systems the opposite of my experience is true.

Carol Haynes:
On my old system I always had hit and miss success with the Acronis boot disk - I had to use the full version if I had no RAID setup (or disconnect the RAID drives) but wanted to use an external USB drive, but if I wanted to use RAID I had to use the Safe mode version. Same goes for their Disc Director suite.

Luckily my new system doesn't seem to suffer from those issues.

I suspect it is a combination of the version of Linux they use and the BIOS's abilty to set up devices at boot time.

mwang:
Another update:

As I said, they asked me to test True Image 11 after the test build of ver. 10 failed to fix the bugs. I had to download the trial ver. myself and then spend a couple of hours testing it against the bugs I reported. Turned out ver. 11 also failed on most of them. I reported back.

Then I got an email telling me "We are expecting fix in new build of Acronis True Image 11.0 Home. When it will be released you will be able to download and test it."

So they're basically saying they'll eventually fix it in ver. 11, and I'm free to pay for it. That's it! Not a word about what started all the exchanges -- I wanted ver. 10 fixed.

After more than a dozen email exchanges, I have to say I'm really unsatisfied with Acronis tech support. They're always polite alright, with boilerplate text that just keep repeating company sound bites, but they rarely listen to what you're asking. A typical example is the one that came after I complained to them about forcing ver. 10 customers to pay for ver. 11 to get bug fixes:

Thank you for using Acronis True Image 10.0 Home http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

Our upgrade policy is to provide free upgrade to customers who purchased the software within 30 days prior to the release of the new version of the product.

We are always at your service should you have any further questions.

Note that you can quickly find the answers to your questions in Acronis Support
Knowledge Base at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/kb/

Thank you.
--- End quote ---

Even though I'd already told them I'd bought ver. 10 two months ago (hence not eligible for free upgrades). So I wrote back to reiterate what I thought was the gist of my original complaint: "I wasn't asking for a free upgrade, I was asking you to fix the outstanding bugs in ver. 10."

Then came the following message:
Thank you for taking time to contact us.

If you have any questions concerning our software, please feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience with the details and we will do our best to help you as soon as possible.

Note that you can quickly find the answers to your questions in Acronis Support
Knowledge Base at http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/kb/

Thank you.
--- End quote ---

If you have any prior contact with Acronis tech support, you should recognize these lines as their standard template. The previous message quoted above contained similar lines as well. I don't mind. But at least they should address my question/complaint in between these lines. The previous message at least attempted as much, however unsatisfactorily. This one, OTOH, just dumped me their template and that's it!

But for the fact that I don't have the time to reinstall my Windows from scratch, necessitating me to keep the images Acronis made for the time being, Acronis would be gone from my desktop by now.

Sorry for the long rant. Just couldn't help it.

Tekzel:
While I like their software very much, the company is the pits from my perspective.  I had TI9 and upgraded to TI10, mainly for the "backup locations" feature which works really well.  Well, except that at one point the program just plain stopped working by schedule.  Every morning it has some error on the screen about the program not working properly.  I can reproduce the issue by starting the scheduled job manually.  If I just go through and do a backup, it works fine.  It only happens when running from the scheduler.  I went back and forth with their email based tech support way longer than I cared to, trying this, and that.  I eventually gave up.  It still only works manually, I tried removing the software and reinstalling it, and deleting the scheduled task and recreating it.  After deleting and recreating it worked for a short while, maybe a week, then the problem came back.  Other than this I have never had a problem with the software.  My experience leads me to question whether they have any idea how their software works.

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