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Software to steer clear of: Acronis Drive Monitor
Acronis is a fairly trusted name in the world of system utilities. Such trust is not easily gained, and should not be abused. This is all the more reason why I am so disappointed with Acronis Drive Monitor.
I downloaded it, hoping for an easy utility to tell me whether or not my drive was failing. Before letting me download this "free" tool, Acronis wanted my full name, country and email address. Okay, no problem.
Since I like Acronis so much, I decided to install it on my real system and not on a virtual machine like I usually do. So I then stepped through their own weird installer, which completed installing the program and then bounced back to the first screen, asking me again whether or not I'd like to install it or "unzip the installation files". Okay, but this was just the download and installation. Maybe the program is still good?
Keeping my hopes up, I launched it. The first thing it tells me is that "I have no backup software installed". Oh, really? I happen to have Oops!Backup, which frankly blows anything Acronis has to offer out of the water. But no, if I don't have Acronis backup, that means "I don't have backup". And the program alerts about it in the most confusing manner, just like it would alert a drive malfunction. This might really cause some novice users to worry.
Then I notice a temperature warning for a disk. The summary doesn't say which disk, and doesn't say what temperature. You have to click through to see (even though it's just four characters of information!). So I click and get a list of my physical drives. No drive has an alert symbol next to it, and they all have 100% health (so why show me an alert, Acronis? Just for fun?). So I have to go through each drive to figure out which one is overheating. After a moment I find it, and see the disk temperature is 118F.
Okay, maybe it's just set to American defaults, right? Surely there's some way to set it to Celsius. Right? Wrong! Fahrenheit it is, and if you don't like it, that's too bad.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that this tool is a shoddy vessel for promoting other Acronis products, and is, quite frankly, an insult to their users' intelligence. If I had to summarize the product in a single word, I would say crap.
Comments
9
Subscribe to commentsNicholas LemarrJul 6th 2010 3:28PM
Thank you. I was wondering if it was just I who didn't appreciate anything about this program. They gave me tons of warnings that, when I researched, were WELL within the manufacturers limits. I received an "Imminent drive failure" alert on a brand new rig.
I see where they were going with this, but I think it needs more than a little polish. It's very unprofessional to moi.
Howard PearceJul 6th 2010 3:33PM
Acronis has had loads of problems with some of their flagship products... just recently they finally came out with a partition manager that installs on win7 and their probalems on their disk imaging builds seems shoddy too.
I am considering a replacement if I find a product good enough.
echotechJul 6th 2010 4:32PM
Still trying to prove it, but after installing their B&R10 product, I lost my Win7x64 installation which I had on a RAID1mobo configuration. Traumatized.
Then after a rebuild, found out that running their app in elevated mode (as required) it wouldn't back up any network locations (that 'feature' is being researched by Tier2 right now - root cause is UAC, but they should have figured out around it).
ToddJul 6th 2010 4:41PM
What do you recommend for drive monitoring/drive testing? I'm planning on juggling a couple drives soon and am thinking about taking a few offline to determine how much to trust them, but haven't really started looking at my options yet. Suggestions on where to start?
(I really appreciate articles like this, but what really would have pushed it to 11 would have been a brief line about what you'll fall back to since this didn't work out.)
CrimsonKnight13Jul 6th 2010 6:18PM
Ashampoo HDD Control
http://www2.ashampoo.com/webcache/html/1/product_2_0065___USD.htm
This app works great for HDD monitoring
reiichirohJul 6th 2010 9:27PM
I switched after 5+ years of using Acronis products to Macrium. It was getting too shovelware-like and crappy with their mandatory yearly upgrade cycle with reduced functionality in each version.
blasztaJul 6th 2010 10:48PM
I use free Seagate DiscWizard (which is Acronis TrueImage re-branded by Seagate) to image my system, and so the Disk Monitor don't give me any alert about it.
For disk temperature, it also give me some warning, and since I only have 1 HDD in my notebook I have no problem finding which one has problem :D
Also the temperature alert is in Celcius. Maybe it related with how you setup Regional Settings in your PC?
So far, I have no problem with it.
RichJul 7th 2010 10:08AM
Great Article.
I did the same thing because I love Acronis software but this software sucks. Its horrible . The sad thing is i suggested it to a bunch of friends be for installing it now they are all pissed at me lol :)
AJNorthJul 24th 2010 10:20PM
Two free HDD monitoring utilities that are worth a look are SpeedFan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php) and Active@ Hard Disk Monitor [free version] (http://www.disk-monitor.com/). I have used both for several years and find both to be useful and safe (SpeedFan is especially well suited to Dell laptops). Both utilities have been extensively reviewed.