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Horrific restore experience

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Hi. I have been using Acronis for years and have now bought my third iteration of upgrade for 2 PCs.

I needed to restore my SDD (whole disc), which I had backed up and validated using ATI 2012. Since the SSD was corrupt I was attempting to use a 2012 backup CD. The backup was on an external USB3.0 drive, the SSD on a 6Gb/s SATA interface.

ATI, booted off the CD, saw my backup, which was a single full backup file (no incrementals), but as soon as I tried to recover it it displayed some error about not being able to find Volume 1 and the backup, which I had selected at the earlier step disappeared!!

I tried this several times but the same result. For some time I thought I was in real trouble. When I had calmed down I realised I could transfer the SSD and backup drive to my other system with 2012. But even then I was not finished with trouble. The Windows version of 2012 would start the recovery (no volume 1 error), but when it rebooted and tried to use Acronis Loader it would hang!

Finally I tried installing the backup drive inside the PC instead of connecting by USB and the backup was successful. However, the whole process took years off my life.

It seems there is a problem with the 2012 boot CD and also a different problem with recovery from USB mounted drives. any ideas??

Thanks.

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There have been reports that the USB3.0 driver works on some systems but not on others. The problem is Acronis error messages are somewhat terse and can operate as a catch-all for a group of errors, so it can be difficult to know what is causing a problem.

You would have been eligible for free support due to the problem being a restore issue.

Hopefully Acronis will see your post and see if they can reproduce your problem, though some more details about the brand of USB drive, the caddy used might be of help to them.

Are you able to run a system report from the recovery CD, with the USB drive attached?

Yeah, my biggest beef is that it did not say (and I am still not 100% sure) that it had a problem with a USB connected drive.

The fact that it initially saw the backup on both systems and actually started to restore when running under Windows (not boot CD) led me to fear the backup itself was corrupt. If it had just said "cannot restore from USB drive" or some such I would have known what to do and there would be no panic. The very last thing you need when you have a major system problem and need your trusty recovery software to help is for it to panic you into believing, incorrectly, that everything might be lost!!

My MB is a gigabyte dh-z77-d3 with 4 rear USB3.0 ports
My Caddy is an Akasa Noir S and the drive was a WD Caviar Green 2TB

Hope it helps.

Hello Jon,

Thank you for using Acronis Software.

The support of USB 3.0 is described in this article in our Knowledge Base. But in some situations it may be that an Acronis boot disk, an external drive is not recognized correctly. On some computers, there are also differences in the USB ports themselves this, only the rear USB ports are fully supported, while the front ports are routed through another connection of all accumulated forward ports.
Therefore, you can sometimes solve the problem by the external hard drive to the rear USB port connects.

Your strategy to incorporate the external hard drive was certainly the right idea to solve the problem quickly. But I would also point out that problems in the restoration, without ongoing support, is supported by us at any time. In such cases, I suggest you contact Acronis Support. For more information, click here.

If there is anything else, we can do for you, please let me know.

Thank you.

Hi Peter, thank you for taking the time to reply to my thread. I appreciate it. It is good to hear that support would be available for the restoration process without a support agreement.

However, I am sure you can appreciate the panic that follows successfully seeing and opening a backup file and then having the process fail. It surely feels like the backup is corrupt. Apart, of course, from better USB 3.0 support, there is one thing I think Acronis really should do to improve this situation. I mentioned it above, but I will just re-iterate. If it has a problem with a USB drive, or even if it MAY just possibly have a problem with a USB drive, it should tell the user this and suggest a workaround. Instead, on my original system it first showed the backup file on the USB drive, but then asked for "Volume1" when trying to recover it! On my second system it again saw the backup, rebooted and hung on the Acronis Loader screen. Neither of these were helpful at all!

It is worth adding that the USB port on my original system was an Ivy Bridge Intel port (rear of the PC), so it really should be supported. The port on my second system was a front panel port, so that may not have helped.