Acronis 40% Christmas Discount

[Jibz]

Just got this from Acronis:

Holiday Discount — 40% off on all products

And also have a 40% off holiday discount on all our award-winning Home and Home Office products and upgrades!

To get this special discount:
1.   Just open our online Home and Home Office store
2.   Put ANY product/products or upgrades into the Shopping Cart
3.   Simply type the special promo code CHRISTMAS in a promotional code field in the Shopping Cart and click "Submit":

That's it! A couple of mouse clicks, and you have this incredible Christmas discount!

You can also tell your friends and colleagues about this exclusive promo code.
Anyone can use it! Isn't it a good holiday gift?

http://www.acronis.com/

[m_s]

You beat me to listing this 

Tell me, is this worthwhile?  The other deal is $100 off their Privacy Expert, Disk Director, and True Image in one - so that's $60 for the three programs (plus a support ticket worth $30).  I am broke as always (I earn too little money - anybody want to sponsor me while I finish my re-training?  I'm a pretty good and experienced writer...), but if this is as good a deal as it sounds, I can borrow some money... Any opinions?

[f0dder]

Oh, pretty nice Jibz!

Just ordered 10 copies of TrueImage for the museum I do admin stuff for, easier than sending a fax to them which would only have gained me a 10% discount anyway

[Carol Haynes]

I am using Acronis products these days (TrueImage and DiskDirector). They have released new versions of both recently, and TrueImage in particular came in for a caning over poor debugging.

It still isn't perfect. I have images that verify happily when examined from windows but won't verify from the recovery disc - a serious issue if you OS partition goes down and needs to be recovered since it won't restore anything if it thinks the archive is corrupt.

[f0dder]

Yes, I've heard about people having these kinds of problems - luckily I haven't experienced any yet with my evaluation version (Acronis sent me an ISO image when I asked about some specific hardware support - nice having an "official looking" email address and "interested in purchasing 10 licenses" ). I've verified the images from both windows and their boot-time thingy, which has succeeded. Never had to restore a full image yet, but "plugging" images from windows has worked.

I dunno if the problems people have are to be attributed to Acronis code, or the fact that their boot-time system is linux based... :-)

[Carol Haynes]

I think there are some issues with the Linux basis of their software. Certainly DiskDirector seemed happy resizing some of my Windows partitions (until I checked them with PartitionMagic which said the partition table was corrupted!). I haven't dared try version Acronis DD 10 doing that sort of thing.

The other thing I find disappointing is that they don't support any form of RAID setup, whereas other applications do. (I didn't find this out before I bought because my RAID hardware was BIOS disabled at the point I was checking out the evaluation). Ironically I think TrueImage 9 was more stable than version 10 and still is.

If anyone is interested the only things added since version 9 is a pretty useless file/folder based extra function. I have experimented with it and personally would prefer to use Windows Backup (which I wouldn't) or even WinZip. The other thing added was differential backups but these are very confusing and the documentation is extremely unclear on how it all works. I know what and how differential backups are supposed to work from other systems but the Acronis version seems to be a somewhat confusing adaptation of Incremental backups - I certainly get extra files with Differential backups which isn't supposed to happen, and restoring them seems a bit hit and miss.

Their recovery CDs won't even boot into full mode if you have a RAID array.

My take on their 'special offers' is that their sales have taken a bit of a hit over the release of TrueImage 10 which was truly awfull in its release state, and long time users uninstalled it rapidly and went back to version 9. Personally I think functions like backup generation and partition management should be tested to destruction before release over a long period of time - without rock solid confidence in the product the whole brand becomes a bit unreliable. Thier hearts are in the right place, but they are a bit too eager to get stuff out in the wild which will end in tears if they aren't careful.

[f0dder]

Hm, where do you see TrueImage 10? I've only been able to find TI9 on their site.

Their recovery CDs won't even boot into full mode if you have a RAID array.

Works fine here, NForce4 native SATA mirror RAID - but of course you'll be dependant on the linux kernel version they use.

[PEdge]

Thanks, Carol, for sharing your insight on the new version of TrueImage (it's actually 9, not 10) .

All stability issues aside, I was very disappointed by their direction in adding bloat (the file backup stuff) to what was arguably the most promising disk imaging solution. In my opinion, this was a seriously flawed idea considering the number of excellent file backup solutions already on the market, and the likelihood that many (if not most) of their existing and potential customers had already purchased one.

Sadly, it looks like version 8 will be the end of the line for me.

[Carol Haynes]

Sorry about that - TI has jumped v. 8 ->9 , DD has jumped v. 9 -> 10

Interesting comment about the SATA Raid being compatible - I'm sure Acronis say they do not support RAID on their website (in either product). Mine is an onboard Promise FastTrak 100 IDE inteface, which is pretty standard out there (long in the tooth) so I would have thought it would be supported if they did.

In fact it says it supports RAID in DD 10, but doesn't say yes or no for TI 9.

What it does say is that TI 9 comes with two versions on the CD ROM one of which is Linux based (the full version) and the other is DOS based. The Linux based version is capable of supporting RAID (if the drivers load) but the DOS version isn't, so from my point of view TI 9 does not support RAID which is a bummer!!

I presume the DD 10 rescue disc will have the same problem - so again I can use it to manipulate RAID partitions but if something goes wrong I have no rescue facility. I bought DD to replace PartitionMagic which has been hit by the Symantec WORM (Was Originally Real Mean) and hasn't seen any development in a few years. Luckily PM 8 still supports the bits Acronis don't - which really says it all about Acronis development!!