What happened to Acronis?

I have used Acronis for the past 5 or 6 years. To start with they were a fantastic company with a fantastic product. I started with Norton Ghost and then moved onto Acronis when Norton Ghost became unusable.

However, over the years Acronis has become worse and worse to use. The first noticeable negative change was with the release of Acronis True Image Home 2011. The user interface within Windows was fine. If you wanted to be extra secure and store Images on disc (just to be safe) you would have to use the Acronis bootable media. My goodness, it could not be worse. Creating an image of the computer after drivers but before any programs have been installed for me was about 6GB. This requires a 2 disc Image. Using the bootable media with a 2 disc (or any multi disc) Image makes you want to shoot yourself. It asks for the last media first, disc 2. You place it in, set the Image going and then it asks for the first disc. A split second of reading the first disc it asks for the last disc again. A split second after reading the last disc it asks for the first again and begins restoring from the Image. That doesn't sound to bad apart from the fact that to get to this stage you must have told the program to ignore errors on at least 3 separate occasions. This is very worrying for such a large company but I can live with all that. At least it gets the Image done.

Then out comes the 2012 version. I purchase it and upon trying to make a recovery from a backup I've noticed there is no option that I can select which tells it to always overwrite files even if they are newer than the ones in the Image. They are always going to be newer and I always want them overwriting otherwise I wouldn't be doing Images in the first place. This option was here in 2011 but not in 2012. Rather confused I decided the best course of action would be to contact Acronis and find out what's going on. Then I discovered their customer support. It is terrible. For instance, it is September 2012 as I write this and they have dropped support on the 2011 version. A product that is less than 2 years off the shelf having support dropped. That is beyond pathetic to me. I discovered this after being told my 2012 version, which is registered, is not registered. Next you'll discover that this company with a revenue of over $170 million dollars charges you on a "Pay Per Incident" scheme to ring them up. I've already paid about £40 for this license (forgetting about the multiple past versions I've bought), what more can they squeeze out of me.

Answer. None.

I will not be buying another Acronis version ever again. They went the way of Norton Ghost; becoming unusable and charging too much. Time to find some new Imaging software.