I've been using Acronis True Image since Version 8 and it has generally worked okay, on Windows XP. I was forced to upgrade to a newer version last year because version 8 didn't support ATI SATA controllers unless you used it in Windows, which is useless if you need to restore the operating system because it can't find any partitions.
So I upgraded to True Image 11, and what a bloated steaming pile of panda dung it is. I'm not in the mood for writing a verbose review, so I'll just list some of its bad points, but there are many more than this. On Vista, this program is unbelievably useless whereas it kind of works on XP.
- Doesn't wake the PC to perform Scheduled Tasks. You'd think that a program designed for Windows Vista would be able to handle power management. Nope. Even though it insists on running 4 or 5 background services, one of which is a scheduler, True Image is actually incapable of waking a sleeping PC to perform backups.
- Doesn't keep a PC awake whilst backing up. Since the Acronis scheduler doesn't work right, you can use the Vista Task Scheduler, but here there are other problems. Two or three minutes after the PC wakes, it goes back to sleep because True Image doesn't keep it open. Acronis technical support had the great suggestion to disable sleep mode on the PC (great!) and stated that it's impossible on Vista. However, a 3rd party has written a utility which manages to keep the PC awake so it's clearly the incompetance of Acronis' programmers who don't have a clue how Vista works.
- Image Browser. The standby issues are annoyances but the bugs with the image browser (by this I mean the disk/partition images) are a data loss risk. In True Image 8, there was a nice simple shell extension for XP that mounted the disk images as a new read-only partition. That worked great. True Image 11 doesn't work great. In TI11 it still has a shell extension (assuming that the installer decides it wants to install it - two of my Vista systems didn't) but it loads the image "in-situ". This is fine, and probably simpler than mounting partitions, but it just doesn't work. I just tried to copy the contents of the My Pictures directory to my new Windows installation, and it copied about 25% before stopping. No error, no message, no log. Nothing. If I hadn't checked it I would have assumed that it copied okay.
- Explorer crashs. Even when the shell extension does manage to copy ALL of your data without silently discarding it, expect to see Explorer crashes whilst using it.
The list goes on, with little things like random pauses/freezes when opening or closing and other niggling little bugs. True Image 8 worked great and they've made a complete hash of it in v11.
Basically, avoid this. I don't know if the 2009 version is any better, but given their policy of releasing a buggy version and then dropping support and expecting you to pay for an upgrade, I won't be trying it. I've lost all confidence in Acronis and they've proved themselves to be just another Symantec.