Exclusions not working on Windows 8
I have five Windows 7 systems and one Windows 8 system (all 64-bit) running Acronis ABR 11.5 build 37975.
On each of the Windows 7 systems I have two tasks:
System - excludes C:\Users\
User - excludes C:\dell\, c:\Drivers\, c:\Intel\, c:\Program Files*\, c:\Windows\, etc.
which works fine.
When I create similar tasks on the Windows 8 system, the exclusions don't work. All files on the C: drive gets backed up for both tasks.
Is this a known problem?

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I checked the plans for sector-by-sector mode and it is unchecked. I received no errors from ABR when backing up.
One thing I thought of is the drive/partition is "GPT Protective Partition". Could this be of any issue?
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Where is it displayed as "GPT protective partition' ? Generally it's a bad sign - GPT protective partition is a fake partition on a GPT disk to make programs, that are not aware of GPT partitioning scheme and only knowing about MBR, think that the disk has the only partition occupying its entire space (or first 2 TB). If it's displayed as such in ABR backup source selection dialog, it's most likely the consequence of such incorrect detection. It would backup in sector-by-sector mode then, but you wouldn't be able to see backup's contents as files in this case.
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I probably should not add the "GPT Protective" term. It's a carry over when I tried to connect the drive to an older computer when I first got the computer.
I don't have access to the computer at the moment and though I don't have any notes from within Windows 8 that says specifically it's a GPT, however I do document that drive has 5 partitions.
One thing that I did notice yesterday is that ABR, on the Win8 system, does not show "Disk Management" under the navigation list.
Does ABR not allow using exclusions with GPT?
Or could my use of the prefix "C:" not work in this situation? Should I use another "drive" designation? Under Windows' Disk Management display, it's the last partition in the list of 5 partitions.
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>One thing that I did notice yesterday is that ABR, on the Win8 system, does not show "Disk Management" under the navigation list.
Yes, it's a known limitation.
>Does ABR not allow using exclusions with GPT?
It should work OK with them.
You can check if it's c: prefix that causes exclusions not work, although I doubt it's the reason - exclude some file type by wildcard, e.g. *.jpg
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>>One thing that I did notice yesterday is that ABR, on the Win8 system,
>>does not show "Disk Management" under the navigation list.
> Yes, it's a known limitation.
Is this with Win8 in general (i.e. whether MBR or GPT)?
> You can check if it's c: prefix that causes exclusions not work, although
> I doubt it's the reason - exclude some file type by wildcard, e.g. *.jpg
I'll experiment a bit more. It's time consuming because it's a 100GB partition. sigh....
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Is this related to the problem of when I try to remotely configure a Windows 8 plan (I'm not using Server), in the "What to back up", the disks/volumes listing always shows "Resolving..." and I can't see the disks?
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I ran a test creating an empty file on c:\ called TEST.TIB and the task did not exclude it.
Any ideas?
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It may be related to endless 'resolving' in volumes list, butI have no idea what can cause it.
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Well after a couple of months of testing by both myself and Acronis Support staff, the problem was traced to disk error, specifically the MFT bitmap. All that was required was running chkdsk on the drive and it cleared it up, finding 3 bad clusters.
I am thankful and impressed with the Acronis Support staff for not giving up on my problem.
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