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Recovery does'nt work at all

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Hey,
I use Acronis for two months now and do a backup every day on a 6 TB NAS (Zyxel NSA 325v2). In the beginning I did some differential backups before the next full backup. The last few weeks I used the incremental backup system.

Yesterday the worst case happened. I had I virus infection despite F-Secure. No idea where the infection came from. Well, I just wanted to recover the PC status two days before. For Acronis that seems to be impossible. Everything I tried just failed. I created a boot medium (tried severals CDs and DVD): On startup, I saw the "Acronis loader please wait" followed by a black screen and no reaction. Same thing when I tried the Acronis recovery function in the Acronis Software. Everything seemed to be ok until the reboot when nothing happened.

Sometimes when I chose the backup file in windows to recover, it said, it was corrupted or the path wasn't available. Fortunately just little data is lost but I spend the last 16 hours (!!!) copying every single file I needed from the backupsystem to my PC. Besides although I told Acronis to do backups of my whole system and did not exclude any Folders, the "appdata" Folder (Windows/users/XXXX/appdata) is empty and so my Outlook data and programm saves are gone. Sorry Acronis, that is shit! I bought the software for exactly this case and I'm really angry for having so much trouble with it. Against expectation a single click on "recovery" obviously was much too much for Acronis.

So what can I do not to have that Kind of desaster another time?

PS: My PC is kind of upper middle class to high end PC, I built two months ago. Latest Driver, no rubbish Software.

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Julius,

Sorry to hear of your unfortunate experience with the virus and the True Image app disaster. To avoid such problems with the TI app it helps tremendously if the user becomes familiar with the application functions and how the app works in general. Thoroughly reading the documentation can go a long way in doing that. Reading the FAQ's can also be of great benefit. Understanding minimum hardware, OS support, and media support is also necessary which can all be found in the documentation.

To address your post in some detail you obviously had issue with the application booting into the recovery environment so that a recovery could be attempted. It is recommended that a user create bootable Recovery Media from within the application and test such media prior to there being a need to use it. Each machine is a bit different in configuration so some machines boot fine to such media and others have some issues. It is best to discover what issues there are if any with the Recovery Media and your machine before it is needed. There are 2 options for bootable Recovery Media available from within the application. A Linux based ISO image can be created which is the standard and it is also possible to create a WinPE based version which requires a bit more work but is suitable for certain machines due to better driver support.

The TI application follows Microsoft's back up exclusions rules when creating back up archives. The appdata folder is unfortunately on this exclusion list. You can choose to not exclude that folder and several others from within the application by choosing the "Options" option button during the task creation and then choosing the Exclusions tab and then removing the folders that you do not want excluded from the list. It is also possible to edit the Windows Registry keys that control this function if so desired.

This is all probably to little to late but it may help you somewhat in the future.

Thanks for the answer and sorry for my bad behaviour. I had a lot to do yesterday, so I was very upset cause nothing worked. You're absolutly right. I should have checked the CD before. I'll give the WinPE-Version a try.

I don't understand why the app data folder is gone. I did not exclude anything more than preconfigured and checked that menu! excluded are some folders within the appdata (browser temporary files etc) but not the appdata folder with ist subfolders (local, roaming ...) itself.

Just for the future: May I work on my PC while the backup is running? Can Acronis save files that are in use (Outlook, word documents, gamesaves etc)

The application when beginning a back up task creates a snapshot of the data specified in the task and uses that snapshot to create the back up. This allows the user to continue to use the PC while the back up is running. Any changes made by the user after the snapshot is created will not be included in the back up.