It’s been a frustrating week for my law firm’s IT Department (I am my own IT department). My generic desktop PC’s ability to use Wifi stopped working. I tried various repairs, but after nothing worked, I decided to restore my computer a few days back with a backup program called Acronis 2018. I had been diligently making backups for the past couple years with this program, but I was living in blissful ignorance. This week, I attempted a full metal-to-metal restore twice but it twice failed. I was also confused by the entire Acronis process. It wasn’t entirely clear to me how to make the boot disk or whether a boot disk was necessary. For my third try, I contacted Acronis support. No live people were available on a voice line unless you were willing to pay an additional $20. A support person on a chat line had seen my several previous emails to Acronis discussing my concerns and questions, as well as my failures.
This person on the chat line walked me through the restore, step by step. This took an hour. After the restore was underway, he assured me that when it was finished, my computer would look exactly like it did when I last backed it up. When the restore was complete, however, my PC screen read: “RESTORE FAILED.” The Acronis people responded again when I reported this failure by email, but they were asking me to refer to computer logs when my computer would display one and only one screen: “RESTORE FAILED.” No thanks. I had given up on Acronis, especially after spending 8 hours trying to get these restores to work.
Luckily, Dropbox and Onedrive were working like champs, so most of my data was safe. But this episode was a big frustration for me. My work around was to purchase an iMac. I appreciate Apple’s Time Machine more than ever. Easy to use and bulletproof. And here are my words of warning. If you buy a new backup program, find some way to test it before relying on it. I don’t know whether there actually a way to do a test restore. I personally wouldn’t want to mess with my PC like this. It takes too much damned work and if it fails, you’ll be up shit creek without paddle. I have used Time Machine on other Macs over the years, and it has been bulletproof. Apple’s Time machine is one of the most impressive apps out there. That’s where my money is now.
