In a true need case, the software is useless. Have had no end of pain with the 'Acronis secure area' which is supposed to be a reserved area of hard disk that the o/s cant touch, in which to store files. Unfortunately, neither can Acronis, with any reliability - image writes fail, with no explaination!

Overcoming this by installing a second hard drive (although I assume simply partitioning a single drive would also work) Restoring from a backup to recover from corrupted system files proved impossible. The main disk being 'in use' when it's resore from image was requested, Acronis asks for a re-boot. Which fails. Trying to boot from an Acronis boot disk, either 6 floppys or a CD-R it created also fail - the boot-up terminating with fatal errors - attempt to terminate idle thread - something vaguly Linuxy, and nothing that gets you to a state where you can restore the image.

Eventually reduced to removing both drives, and restoring one from the image on the other when fitted to another machine.


Acronis is highly underrated   January 19, 2006
 2 out of 3 found this review helpful

This software has saved me on more than one occasion at work and at home. It is easy to use and works!!! I have used several Acronis products now and have no complaints whatsoever.


Doesn't like peripherals, but Backup is good   January 14, 2006
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

Whilst the backup seems good, fast and simple to use, I lost access to my external card-reader for as long as Acronis TrueImage 8 was installed. Solution - uninstall & all back to full functionality.

I have tried several setting changes, but after about 6 hours fighting it I took the backup & then uninstalled. I'm no geek who wants to go modifying the registry files, so I'm not going to be using this any longer than it takes me to get another product (ie Norton Ghost) - hoping that this is fully compatible.


Good product, mostly!   November 8, 2005
 12 out of 12 found this review helpful

I bought Acronis Disk Image 8, having had some bad experiences with Norton Ghost 9. Certainly Acronis is quicker, simpler to use and understand, although it doesn't have the same breadth of features as Ghost (at least in this version 8). But if you simply want to make a hard disk image back-up, then Acronis is hard to beat.

Like Ghost, Acronis still has issues with some CD/DVD drives, burning software and media. In particular it can report some DVD back-ups as corrupted whilst verifying them, despite the fact that the actual DVD burning process went fine.

I found that using good quality DVD media does reduce or eliminate this problem. The same was true for a friend's system also using Acronis Disk Image 8. However, the fact it happens at all, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the back-ups.

The DVD's may actually be fine and would work, but you just can't be 100% certain. Better to transfer back-up images onto another hard disk, if you can.