Downloader: Software to steer clear of: Acronis Drive Monitor

Sunday, July 25, 2010

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.