Recently I purchased True Image 8.0. I based my purchase of this software on e-mail from Acronis, Magazine reviews and the information provided on the package. On the front of the package it says: "A complete PC backup solution"! On the back: "Save backup images to CD and DVD, USB 1.0/2.0 and firewire devices and networked drives". It doesn't! In order to backup to CD or DVD you have to purchase a third party UDF formating program like Ahead In-CD. No where on either the package or in the on-disk manual does it tell you this. I e-mailed them right away! There response was very quick. Basically they told me that "this version of True Image does not write directly to CDs or DVDs and that I would need third party software to back up to this media". I love the last line: "We will certainly implement direct DVD recording in Acronis True Image in the future". I e-mailed them back and told them that for me, the future is now! I also pointed to the fact that the present software does not do what it claims to do and I want to know what Acronis is going to do about my problem. I haven't heard a word!!! The software works flawlessly as long as I am backing up to another partition on my hard drive. However, I have only one drive and my dell is not made for adding a second. I don't want the back up on my hard drive because if the drive goes down the backup is worthless. I could cobble something up to make another drive work and then remove it when I'm done but this is a clumsy solution at best. Besides, the package that True Image backs up to CDs and DVD. Thats me and anybody else that bought it paid for! I thought Vaporware was a dead issue years ago. I would call this program "Existing Vaporware"! It makes claims but can't deliver on those claims. What really kills me is that I know that as soon as the promised "Future" version is available, I'll be offered an upgrade for another $24.99. So lets hear it out there! The only way we will ever get what we are promised is to go to their web-site at www.acronis.com and let them know that until they bring out the complete version that will do all of the claims on the package we ain't interested in buying the present incomplete version! Sincerely, Russ
UPDATE My e-mail from Acronis gave me a web site (http://www.acronis.com/my/updates/). I installed the latest build and I now can back up to CDs without UDF formating. The DVD still won't work but at least its progress. Sincerely, Russ
Update on the Update: I have discovered that while you can burn a disk image to raw CDs. They won't restore! I also discovered that if you burn an image to another partition on the hard drive, you can copy that image to a DVD with Nero 6 and use that DVD for restoring a partition. The only catch is that it will only burn to 1 DVD disk so the backup has to be under 4.6Gb. Sincerely, Russ
