Farewell Acronis & Friends

Thank you for your help sorting out this filter issue and others. I definitely learned some things very useful and insightful from you :-)

Based on this information I am keeping an ATI-free version of my installation.

Sorry to see you leave Richard.

Good luck to you too, Richard.

Richard:

Your knowledge and insights will be missed. I hope that you'll still be contributing to the Reboot.pro forums.

One less person to keep us and Acronis honest. Our loss is some other forum's gain.
Best of luck, Richard,
sh

Thanks to all for the kind words and good wishes. Hope to see you around from time to time. :)

Mark Wharton wrote:

I hope that you'll still be contributing to the Reboot.pro forums.

Will do, but not sure it'll make me very popular here. See http://reboot.pro/16187/

RV, What did you switch to?

I have replaced ATI2012 with Paragon B&R 11. Paragon's cyclic backup may have fewer options than ATI's auto-cleanup feature, but then again ATI's cleanup never worked well for me. At least Paragon keeps an accurate count and cleans up accordingly. The smallest disturbance will confuse ATI and screw things up. And the biggest thing with ATI2012 is that restoring an image simply doesn't work for me. Backup succeeds and so does validation, but restoring does not and that completely defeats the purpose of this product.

What's more, 44.5GB worth of data I uploaded using Acronis Online Backup has been lost on their server. It all disappeared 2 months ago and I'm forced to re-upload everything.

I have no longer any confidence and trust in ATI2012 and Acronis, for that matter. They are close to crossing the line of a fraudulent company.

I've been satisfied with the ShadowProtect Desktop. It is simple and does its job without any unnecessary tricks. Simple and effective. As like True Image a long time ago. I still hope Acronis learn their lessons and go back to simplicity.

Both Paragon and ShadowProtect use the operating system's own shadow copy mechanism (Microsoft VSS) rather than polluting the OS with device class filter driver insertions. So either of them should support any storage device that is supported by the OS itself. For me, my experience here has made that the "Number 1" consideration.

Paragon is a bit of a slowpoke compared with Acronis, although that doesn't matter much to me as I seldom sit around watching backup ops anyhow. I might have preferred ShadowProtect's straightforward "nothing but backups" approach, but they don't accept direct payments (Paypal, etc.) and I don't use credit cards on line. (Just paranoid, I guess.) So anyone should be able to deduce my current personal choice (not necessarily irrevocable) from those facts.

As I said above, my decision was based on much careful consideration of the issues that matter to me. Others should decide for themselves. PLEASE don't PM me more "What did you decide?" queries. Thanks.