Acronis True Image vs Macrium Reflect

I was a user of Acronis going back to before 2008. But several weeks ago I reached my limit with the crashes, required reinstalls to fix corrupted databases, its inability to remain connected to my two NAS units, and delays in shutting down windows because of "pending Acronis activities." After trying Macrium Free for a week I bought the paid version for all 4 of my PCs. The interface is simple and straightforward; it just works. Later this month Macrium will release a new version that will backup and restore even faster. You just can not beat it. If you have any doubts go to the Acronis support forum and read about all of the issues users are having.

Acronis Support said:

Hello SoFine409,
Thank you for taking the time to share your review on Acronis software! My name is EkaterinaSurkova and I'm writing to you on behalf of Acronis Customer Central. I'm really sorry to know, that you've faced issues with our products. Reliability and protection of sensitive data are the core of our business and we are always striving to provide the best customer experience we can. Being our long-term customer would you give us a second chance? Kindly share your contact details in PM, so that we can raise a support ticket and help to address the described issues. Alternatively, you can contact me on Acronis forum: https://forum.acronis.com/user/85273 Feel free to PM me if any questions.
Have a great day!
Ekaterina Surkova
Acronis Customer Central

Acronis product support hasn't been great. I had problems removing low level disk drivers/filters two years ago. Acronis support declined to assist and told me to look on a user forum. After much Googling I eventually found a solution and solved the problem myself - no thanks to Acronis support. The original problem was poor Acronis software design since the uninstaller did not remove some important residual traces of Acronis software. See Solved Safe Removal of Acronis True Image Drivers

Steve C said:

Acronis product support hasn't been great. I had problems removing low level disk drivers/filters two years ago. Acronis support declined to assist and told me to look on a user forum. After much Googling I eventually found a solution and solved the problem myself - no thanks to Acronis support. The original problem was poor Acronis software design since the uninstaller did not remove some important residual traces of Acronis software. See Solved Safe Removal of Acronis True Image Drivers

Hi SteveC. I read your thread about the issues of removing Acronis. It was interesting and I have a couple of observations of my own experience. When I ran the Acronis uninstaller I had none of the residual left overs that were noted in your referenced thread. That's the good news. Maybe Acronis has improved their uninstall routine.
Since I knew about the issue of residual traces from Acronis, my first attempt at uninstalling Acronis involved running the Acronis Cleanup Tool in lieu of simply using the programs uninstaller. Regrettably that caused major issues. VSS would no longer function and therefore I was unable to create either system restore points or use Macrium as it uses VSS to create a system snapshot. Fortunately I had made a full image backup from which I was able to do a recovery. After the restoration I uninstalled Acronis the normal way followed by an uninstall/reinstall Macrium and all went well. In fairness I must speculate that running the Cleanup Tool without first running the Acronis uninstaller and with having Marcium installed at the same time may have been contributing factors. That said I also have concerns about the Acronis Cleanup Tool. Glad we all have our systems running again.
Bob

Hi,

cereberus said:

See the thread on Macrium V7, and it is obvious the new version will be so far ahead of any other tool. As our resident guru Kari says, integrating ViBoot into Reflect is phenomenal.

In fact, the new version looks so great, I will seriously consider buying a licence rather than just using the free version - partly as a thanks to Macrium for their great and continually improving tool over the years.

Acronis - eat your heart out!

Precisely. I feel exactly the same way.

Cheers,

Hi there

I'm not so sure if you need all these extra things in a basic backup and recovery --a simple and easy backup that's what most people need anyway.

I always boot from bootable media -- I don't need to be running Windows when taking an image and certainly not when restoring both of which take what - 15 mins at most with an SSD - and also you don't get stupid errors when your Windows HDD is nearly full of V.S.S errors and the like because the backup hasn't got space for the Volume snapshot or partition lock. This problem is similar to pretty well all backup products run from within a running Windows system though - not particularly a Macrium problem.

It's hard enough to get the average user to do Backups anyway --just look at the zillions of posts where users have had problems (especially on the A/V section) which could have been simply resolved at a stroke - probably at the most within an hour - usually far less -- had they just taken a basic backup.

Users who know what they are doing or are a bit more "Computer Savvy" and possibly have bigger LANS / NAS boxes etc might need all these extra features but IMO Macrium is probably pitching at the wrong set of users. Corporate / Enterprise / SME's also need a more sophisticated product and these sorts of features might be just what is wanted.

I can't think of ANY reason why I'd need to either upgrade currently or buy the PAID product - sorry Macrium - I think the Free product is good - but you should be aiming your pitch at the Millions who never take backups - some of those might go for the paid versions later.

I'd also see if you can get a Linux version out as loads of people are using things like Linux on a NAS box. There are tools on Linux available for backing up regularly - but not really for casual users so a gap in the market is obvious here.

On Linux I'm using GRsync in case there's anybody from Macrium looking - so as this is free you can see what you are up against.

To the Acronis support person - thanks for getting back -- support in the past was hopeless -- but I gave up using your product a while ago - not because it was expensive or unreliable - but the sheer nonsense and difficulty of your activation system (this was back several years) just made me bin the product and look for alternatives -- and until I became a user of several NAS systems I was quite happy with Free Macrium -- did exactly what it said on the tin (and a bit more if you knew where to look).

It's nice also to see support personnel from these companies read the Forums !!!.

(Wish people from B.T would too -- but that's another issue -- I believe it's popularly known in the UK as Bovine Telecomm or B/S Telecomm !!).

Cheers
jimbo

When I moved from Acronis to Macrium, I first tried the Macrium free version. It does the backups, but I bought the package anyway. My way of supporting the company. If we all just used the free version eventually it would go away.

A comment on removing Acronis. The last version I had was the 2013 version (with Win 7). I removed Acronis and ran their clean up tool. I still had a lot of registry entries that I had to remove manually to fully get rid of Acronis. There were so many that I had considered doing a "clean" install of Win 7 but I manually edited the registry and got rid of them.