Acronis True Image 2018 Backup Software

This SW comes with disk and license key. It is the one time license, not the subscription with cloud services. I think it would be wise for Acronis to continue to offer both stand-alone and network based versions of this software to keep both customer bases satisfied.This software installed perfectly and within 15 minutes, I had a complete image backup of all partitions on my solid state system drive. It successfully created a bootable rescue DVD. My new Dell XPS is a high end machine running Windows 10 Pro. Image backup was to external USB hard drive.Be sure to check all of the backup settings. I found that by default certain files were being excluded, among them the pagefile.sys Not sure why, perhaps Windows 10 would recreate the page file if the backup had to be restored. It is also important to define the type of backup, base or incremental, backup schedule, etc.On initial SW install, it informed me that an update was available. I chose not to install the update for fear it would be the subscription based version. Now that I have a backup I can roll back to, I will download, install, and try the new version. I am also now confident to install software applications and let Windows update. A backup is computer engineering rule 1! This is a true image backup, not a file copy.

I have been using Acronis products for over 14 years starting with Disk Doctor then True Image when I transitioned from IBM's OS/2 Warp to the "Evil Empire" (Microsoft Windows).The product just keeps on working, and during those rare events that happen to all products being continuously improved over time and get a hiccup, they have always been there for me to solve it.

Update: 08-29-2018 -- look at the bottom of the screen for a no boot recovery of windows 10 pro and how I solved it.Two months ago I used the product ... here are the results:I'm a long time user of Ghost the corporate version where I make cold offline images by booting from a CD/DVD and dump the image to a separate internal hard drive or external USB 2 or 3 drive. The problem is my ghost v11 is 32bit and can't recognize hard drives over 2TB. So I gave this a shot.First, the CD/DVD is bootable and can be copied and the copy boots and works fine. It even worked on a UEFI bios laptop but I had to go into the bios and enable legacy bios mode. It is a little slow to boot but had all drivers to recognize my hard drive controllers and even USB 3 external drive. It has a hot mode where a drive can bee hooked up after boot and you can scan for it. However, scan takes so long it is quicker to reboot.PROS: it gets the job done both online or hot with windows running (something that I did not test because I didn't want to add more software to windows and I feel safer making cold offline backup images).CONS:Offline where you boot directly from the CD is a little confusing. For example, while loading a laptop with software - windows 10, I made images through out as I added drivers, windows updates, etc. By default, the program looks for prior backups and adds a file for what is known as a incremental backup. Good feature but it should make it clear to the user to choose between incremental and full backups. The best way to deal with this is to click the options or next button but don't click the proceed button until the end that way you get more detail to select exactly what you want.There were times when I was not sure what to click on - again the interface could be made more clear so you know exactly what to click on like a next button, etc.Final thoughts:I also had to restore the laptop I was reloading on to a new hard drive after a windows 10 update left it unbootable. That was two months ago and my neighbor has been using the laptop ever since and that gives me confidence that the images backup AND restore are rock solid and you can depend on them in the event of a failure. Also, I did the same with my windows 8.1 desktop after I installed a new C: drive - this is a complex image of windows that has been in continuous use since ~ 2011. Zero issues. That gives me a very high level of confidence in the product. .------------------------------------Update: 08-29-2018 -- no boot recovery of windows 10 pro and how I solved it.I've made lots of backups of my ~ 8 year old Sony Vaio laptop that upgraded from windows vista to Windows 10 Pro! Recently, I need to restore a backup because a windows update caused some issues.I found the restore screens / process slow and confusing.See my pictures. The first picture of the restore you need to click "New Location" - why not default to the same location from where the backup was made? Next, when you click this it took several minutes for the next screen to appear (part of this may have to do with my laptop being old) but the first time I gave up after a minute. Then I figured out that a sign that the program is doing something is that you hear a beep if you click anywhere on the screen.Final problem, Acronis somehow marked the windows "Recovery Partition" Active instead of the partition where windows is installed aka the C: drive. This caused windows 10 not to boot and display:"An operating system wasn't found. Try disconnecting any drives that don't contain an operating system."Solution: after spending hours and research online I needed to boot the Windows 10 Install DVD and click repair which was unsuccessful then I repeated the process and launched the CMD or command line shell and typed the following commands to mark the C: partition active:diskpartlist diskType select disk 0, replace 0 with your computer’s primary diskType list partitionType select partition 1, replace 1 with the partition’s letter that you want to set as activeType activeType exitYou can restart your computer nowAfter that everything worked perfect. Later as a test I restored the same backup and everything worked perfect and I didn't need to make the C: drive active. I found the solution on an Acrons user forum. The user called the tech support line and got no help and solved it himself and posted the solution. Also, windows repair should have been able to fix this but oh well so much for Artificial Intelligence.

Did not get the usual long password to install. I got a 12 digit one. It only got me into another place that gave me another long number. They also had to give me a password to get in there. I had mistakenly installed this on a computer I didn't want it on. So I took it out and tried to install into another computer. It said I had too many activations, even though I had taken it out of the 1st computer. No way to transfer it to the 2nd computer. They wanted my EMAIL PASSWORD in order to move on. I finally got it on the 2nd computer after fighting it for 2 days. But it also still beeps and tells me too many activations.. Don't know if it will let me do anything yet or not, as I am just too frustrated with it to even try right now. Just be aware!!!! This is not a user friendly program and as far as I am concerned, a waist of money.

It's the stupid little things that bother me. First, if you select BACKUP from the main menu it lists the destination locations, not the source locations. I don't want to back up the destination locations, but the source location, obviously. Additionally, it displays them in large caps, cutting off the end of directory path, the drive letter. Normally you want to back up to a different drive, but without being able to see or even scroll to see the drive letter, how can you tell if you are backing up what you intended.I liked True image for its ease of cloning a C drive for backup purposes, at least compared to Norton Ghost. But now Symantic has improved their backup options so I'll probably go that way. My worry for early backup software was not knowing if the backup was really there; fi not then restoring would actually clobber everything. Now, at least software has the ability to view the backed up files before restoring. Another approach is to use freefilesync to create a duplicate directory elsewhere for backup purposes. That way you can verify that the files are actually there without any worry about damaging something by doing a restore. But it is more manual. And it can't clone the C drive.