I have been thinking of writing this review for a while now, since I have been using Acronis products for more than 3 years now, since version 8. The reason why I wanted to write this review, is to express my frustration with this backup product and help others make the right decision on whether this product should be used for enterprise backup and recovery.
Honestly speaking, when I saw this product for the first time, I was amazed by its ability to backup hard drives sector by sector and the speed of the backup process. There was nothing comparable on the market back then and Norton Ghost wasn’t even close in comparison. After trying the Acronis Workstation product, which worked very well for our needs, I assumed that the Acronis Enterprise Server was just as good and went ahead and bought the product. I wanted to use it in all of our servers (approximately 12 Windows and Linux servers) for our offline backups and get rid of the much hated Symantec Backup Exec that we were using for years.
As soon as I bought the product, version 9 and then version 9.1 came out, with many more features and more Enterprise Backup capabilities. I upgraded to version 9.1, installed the Backup Server and started installing the Acronis Agents on servers. That’s when I first saw a problem with installing the Agent software on a server. The installation would fail, despite all attempts to clean up the previous installation (I followed Acronis documentation and forums) and half of the servers did not get upgraded. After hours and hours of research and reading articles and discussions online, I found a workaround and was able to get the Agent finally installed on the rest of the servers. The process of backing up the hard drives to external media was working out OK, although occasionally the backup job would stop working, requiring manual restart of the process. Backup to an internal storage through their “Backup Server” was messy to start with and old backups would never be correctly deleted from the system and I would quickly run out of space. The only cure was to delete the old backups manually, but even then some files would be left over, eating up free space. Those issues were never fixed, despite the fact that Acronis occasionally released new updates to their 9.1 line.
Without fixing the major flaws and problems in 9.1 product, Acronis released a new version of the product, calling it “TrueImage Echo”. They encouraged customers to upgrade to this version because of the new features and many more new and advanced features of Echo. I went ahead and upgraded after a couple of months, knowing that it’s never a good idea to upgrade to a brand new release right away. Even with the newer patched release of the product, I went through the same nightmare of the upgrade. Forget about previous backup policies and jobs – I had to start everything from scratch and redo all of the backups. And even then, the installation of the Acronis Agent on many of the servers failed and I had to clean up the registry manually and go through many hours of research to just get the Agent to install properly on all servers. During this nightmarish process, I wanted to downgrade to 9.1, but then I knew that once Acronis releases a new version of their product, they stop releasing patches to their previous products…so I decided to still go ahead and after many hours of manual work and god knows how many server reboots, I was finally able to install it on all servers. Obviously, all of this had to be done after hours, because every time you uninstall and reinstall Acronis, you MUST reboot the server for their SnapAPI drivers to work correctly.
TrueImage Echo was the same nightmare as 9.1. Old backup jobs wouldn’t get deleted, backups would stop after a while and things had to be fixed by hand. Every time I looked for a solution, the only “fix” to the problem would be to download the latest version of their product on their support page. Well, I wouldn’t mind upgrading the damn thing if the process was simpler, but you had to go through the same process of uninstalling, then restarting, then reinstalling and restarting again on every single server. And the problems wouldn’t stop there either – the Agent again would not install on some servers and manual registry editing and deletion of files had to be done with more reboots to get the Agent installed properly.
Guess what happens next? Acronis releases a new version of their crappy software, renaming the product line to “Acronis Backup & Recovery”. No more patches to fix the problems came out for Echo, and as usual, they were encouraging all customers to upgrade to this brand new release, which was supposed to be much better than all of the previous products. Guess what? Same thing, except much worse than before! After I installed “Backup & Recovery” on one of the servers, it started to blue screen on reboot! I had to boot in safe mode, then manually delete registry entries to stop loading the SnapAPI drivers (which were the reason why the server would no longer boot) just to get the server to boot up again. Apparently, the released version of the product contained bad SnapAPI drivers and after getting a gazillion number of complaints from users, Acronis released an updated version of the SnapAPI drivers. I then had to install the product, then install the SnapAPI drivers right away to prevent the BSOD from happening.
Since then, a new patched version of the product has been released, but now one of my production servers is so screwed up, that none of the Acronis agents can be installed anymore, even from the very old releases. I’m constantly getting “The installation was interrupted before Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again.” error and I have tried everything on my end to get it to work. I even called Acronis support (the call went to a call center in Moscow) and the tech had to talk to engineers to get me a separate version of the agent, just to get it installed on the server. Apparently, VSS was screwed up on the server (yes, due to Acronis) and they had to find a version of SnapAPI without VSS. Agent got finally installed, but then as soon as I tried to back up the server, it actually killed the machine with another BSOD!
Honestly, I cannot stand this product anymore. It was a bad investment both in terms of money and time and I would discourage everyone to use this product for enterprise backup. The sales rep I used to work with before is no longer with the company and I’m currently trying to contact the reseller to see if they can issue a refund, but most likely it won’t happen…
This message is for Acronis:
1) Stop releasing untested versions of your products to customers and invest more time in testing your product line.
2) Stop releasing “upgrades” and renaming your products, misleading your customers about how the new version fixes all of the previous issues.
3) Continue supporting your older releases and releasing necessary patches to the products, as not everyone likes your new products.
4) Find a way to upgrade your product without having to reboot servers.
5) Find a way to automate the cleanup of registry and files, if the installation of the product fails or if there are some other problems with the product.
6) The new file naming convention, along with backups to external media in Backup & Recovery is a joke! Revert it back to how it was.
7) Fix issues with deleting old backups that are not needed anymore.
8) Address all bugs in a timely manner.
9) Start listening to your customers.
About Nasim Mansurov
MegaZ,
I did have the same issues with Acronis Workstation and Echo versions, I haven’t tried the Backup & Recovery and License Key server yet, probably won’t.
Well, after several tries of installing and configuring the Acronis Echo latest version I think that came out on July of 2009, it is working just fine, I have it installed on 5 Geology workstations in US and 6 other in Turkey, the one in US is connected to a Drobo box, (www.drobo.com) via physical server, we don’t use teh Acronis for server backups though, mainly for enterprise level workstations like precision or HP Z. But I agree, it doesn’t automatically consolidate the backups, that feature doesn’t work at all, even though that it’s there, I do it manually once a week with shift+del. Their default answer is to upgrade to the new version. Moscow techs suck balls. When I call I open a ticket with them, and always try to talk to Level 2 techs, they usually know more that the frontline techs.
For server backups we use ArcServe 12.5, which is a lot better than Symantec or BackupExec, I think. We are also testing Veeam Backup, sicne we have VM infrastructure.
Good luck.
Seminolex, thank you for sharing!
I use the latest version of EMC NetWorker to back up production databases, Microsoft Exchange and other critical data and never had any problems with it. The only reason why I purchased Acronis, was for offline backups and it seems like this will be my last purchase of Acronis products…
I will definitely look into ArcServe.
As far as VM, I’m planning to move some physical servers to VmWare vSphere, but it seems to be an awfully expensive product, since you have to purchase licenses for each CPU…but it might be worth it in the long term.
I have experienced the same frustrations that you have described with Acronis Backup and Recovery 10. This product is the absolute WORST enterprise-level solution attempt I have ever tested. I highly recommend to anyone reading this not to pay anything for the server product; quickly run in the opposite direction. If you want to test the trial and have a lot of free time, have fun, but I wouldn’t pay anything for this poorly designed, developed, and supported product. The support is even worse than the software.
I have used the standalone Acronis workstation and server products in the past with no issues, but the License Server and Management Server products are simply horrible. I have spent over 30 hours with support without consistent backups. Something is always failing, giving errors, hanging, and/or crashing. I have lost some respect from colleagues in my IT department for recommending and attempting to implement this backup solution.
Unfortunately, I have nothing good to say about Backup and Recovery 10 other than it was a good idea. I still use the old Acronis imaging products for individual computers/servers, but Acrnois is simply not ready for the enterprise. I am truly disappointed to have to write this reply, because I have always been a fan of Acronis in the past.
Jim, thank you for sharing your story! I hope the message comes across to Acronis and they listen to their valuable customers, because if they don’t, they will quickly lose all of them. I also really liked the workstation version of their product and wish they could do a better job on the enterprise level…