Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Review "Don't wait for your hard drive to crash. The disaster already happened." What starts out as a demonstration and review turns into a massive waste of time and disaster when it comes to the Acronis line of products. Avoid disaster altogether and skip the Acronis Backup & Recovery product line. When it comes to Acronis products, they are often seen as the world leader in system backup. This video demonstration and review takes a look at the strength and weaknesses of one of the later Acronis products. Three virtual machines are connected to a host hub, all running Acronis Backup & Recovery 2011 Advanced Workstation. The host hub will function as the main source for backups for the other workstations, and will also be used to try the data deduplication feature, which is said to significantly decrease storage space requirements for backups. The video goes further to explore the weaknesses of a hot (live) backup and restore versus the traditional, tried, and true method of bare metal backup and restore. The video serves as a critique of a user interface gone awry with unnecessary complexity, advertising that the narrator believes goes over the top, and a pricing structure that is out of range for the quality of products being sold. What started as a review and demonstration, slowly becomes a demonstration of a product that has become so complex it may be extraordinarily difficult to deploy even in the smallest of environments, much less an enterprise environment. As such, the video compares Acronis Backup & Recovery 2011 Advanced Workstation with other well-known backup products from Paragon. Sadly, the narrator had hoped to obtain additional marketing information and software licensing from the PR and Marketing team at Acronis, in order to properly evaluate 2011 Advanced Server properly. The video culminates in the total frustration that many veterans of backup and restore may face when attempting to use the product simply over NAT and on a Local Area Network. Clocking in at over one hour, this video is not for the faint of heart, and should be viewed as a learning experience shared by both the presenter and the viewer. Ultimately, through no fault of the narrator, this video becomes somewhat of an expose about how successful companies make it big in PC and computer magazines, and then fail to deliver, even in a structured test environment. The video is narrated and presented by Mike Fara, Microsoft MVP, MCITP, MCTS, MCSA, MVP, CompTIA Network+ and A+ certified. Mike has deployed Acronis True Image Echo Server and Acronis True Image Echo Workstation many times in the field. He holds no bias towards the software manufacturers and was disappointed by the experience. The video is made possible by Windows 7 Forums (http://windows7forums.com), and stems from a real attempt to give viewers an in-depth look in backup and restore solutions.
