Acronis Software Comment

A week or so ago I requested information on how to upgrade a laptop hard drive and was given the recommendation to use Acronis software, which I could download and test for free.

Fair warning - the documentation was not all that hot - it took quite a while to find the clone disk command under Utilities, since the documentation, over 100 pages, did not seem to mention this. I first tried the backup and restore approach which took many hours but in the end failed.

But worst of all when I discovered the clone disk command it allowed me to clone my hard drive to an external drive in preparation for cloning it back to the new hard drive, a process that took a couple of hours. However, when you attempt to clone the external copy back to the new hard drive you get a message saying that the trial copy is not really the complete software as seemed to be stated at download, but an abridged version which will not let you do complete the process.

I believe that Acronis is misleading users at its website by saying you are downloading a 15 day full version of the software. I can express a certain amount of anger having waste 3/4 of a day attempting to use the software, when if they had chosen to be upfront I could have made a choice about buying it or not.

I do appreciate the those of you who recommended the software, but I want you to be aware of this questionable practice. I have been a Excel MVP for many years, and I can assure you that the general public would become extremely angry if they downloaded the full version of Office 2007 (with a 60 day trial period!) and it wouldn't do many of the things the regular version does.