Acronis Disk Director 12

This software messed up my hard drive, and I now have 20 Gb less storage than before. I have an old Windows Vista computer with a 160 Gb ntfs mbr HDD that the factory had partitioned into two equal C & D volumes with a small third system volume. I wanted to increase the size of the C volume which has 90% of the programs and data by reallocating free space from the D volume to the C volume. First off, this is not a simple matter in Disk Director, because you cannot work on more than one volume at a time. The documentation is very confusing, but I eventually figured out that I had to first reduce the size of the D volume to create unallocated space. I then had to increase the size of the C volume by checking a box to include all available unallocated space on the disk. The first time I did this I reduced the D volume by 30 Gb and then increased the C volume by the same amount. This worked fine. Next, I transferred some files from the D volume to the C volume, and decided to further increase the C volume by 20 Gb taken from the D volume. All seemed fine until the last step where the C volume is modified and all hell broke loose with a slew red error messages stating multiple actions not had been completed. But, according to Disk Director, everything was fine and the C drive had increased by 20 Gb while the D drive had decreased by 20 Gb and there was no remaining unallocated space on the Disk. Imagine my shock when Windows reported that the C volume was its old size 20 Gb smaller but the D volume had indeed shrunk by 20 Gb. Just to be sure, I ran Windows Chkdsk in safe mode, and it reported a healthy volume that was the same smaller size. So, somehow the HDD has been hosed so that I've lost 20 Gb of space and I don't see any way to fix it short of a new low level format. I also tried using the bootable CD, but it hangs with some error that asks for a reboot and won't work either. What I don't understand is why this software doesn't automatically reverse faulty operations. Anyway, there's no way in heck I'll let this garbage product get anywhere near my new Windows 10 computer.

This was used on an older (ca. 2009) hand-me-down computer that I wanted to get just a little more life out of by installing a solid state drive that was pulled from my "daily driver" for upgrade. In other words, I wasn't spending any money on it. It really wasn't worth spending money on the newer version, and to be honest I'm not even sure the machine will even be used. I've been using Acronis products for years on my main machine and with the exception of one weird glitch when I first started using it have been quite happy.The weird glitch? For some reason it insisted on backing up the back up files, so my shiny new 4TB drive filled in less than a week when I had it set to only back up the boot drive. (500GB and nowhere near full.) I finally gave up and reformatted the back up drive and reinstalled the software, and everything was OK after that. It's still a bit of a space hog (not to be confused with the alt rock band) but manageable. That didn't apply to this version in my case, but as they say, YMMV.

I wanted this software to give me more options with hard drives than is offered by "TrueImage". such as setting up dynamic disks. But, use caution....this software has a lot of capability including the capability to hose your hard drive...at least the data on it...if you are not careful. Experimenting is not advised. I am pretty capable with computer hardware and still managed to mess up a dynamic disk import...my fault.The one feature I don't like about DD12 is the fact that if the software detects a dynamic disk with a corrupt LBA file (ie, from a failed dynamic disk export/import) it freezes you out of all operations on any disk on that system until you disconnect the bad disk...which means data recovery with this software is unlikely in that situation...I had to go to other software working from the command line to even be able to re-initiate the drive, and of course lost all data. Acronis TrueImage, which I also own, sees the disk as "Invalid" if you try to use the "add disk" feature. So even though you can convert back and forth between dynamic and basic disks and change partitions, etc. without data loss, moving a dynamic disk from one pc to another is tricky, as some of the dynamic disk's boot record is stored in the OS's registry. I found out the hard way. In fact, stick with basic format unless you really need the added features of dynamic disks (mirroring, striping, spanning).I attach a couple of screen shots that show some of this software's features.