[Resolved-ish] Can't recover from my Backups!
Hi guys, Ive been doing a full disk image back up to an external USB hard drive. From memory, I am using the incramental system, creating a full back up every 5th time.
I need to recover this disc to an earlier point in time, however I've tried three differnt methods with no luck:
Frist, I tried from the Acronis program installed on the computer, I clicked recover disks and am presented with a pop up box saying "Cannot find version 6" which comes up with several options "retry" "cancel" "Ignore version" and "browse". I have no idea what this is asking me for so haven't got an furthur then this. Looking at the backed up files, I notice they all end in v1 except one which ends in v1-2 if this means anything.
Second I tried booting from the WinPE envirement on an USB drive, my computer will not give me the option to boot from this drive.
Third, I used the same USB drive, but used the basic bootable media option in Acronis, I can boot from this fine, but when I try to do the recovery, my External drive with the backups does not show up? As well as cloud and network options, it shows my c: drive that I'm trying to recover to, an "removeable drive" (the bootable USB I'm assuming), and an "h" drive, with nothing on it, that is 0kb in size. I've tried connecting the USB Hard drive in several differnet ports, including USB 3 and 2 ports.
Can anyone help me recover my backups, and please tell me my money spent on this program and it's back ups are not useless.


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Hi, thanks for the reply.
I tired the first method again, and selected "browse" and randomly picked all the backups untill one worked. It gave me the option to pick the back up I wanted, I picked an incremtal update about a week ago and awat it went, but after restarting got the message "failed to poen backup VECTOR180_inc_b2_v1"
I tried the same as above again, but picked the full back previous to the incremental one I tired, and got the same error message. I ahve my backsups set to verfiy after backing up, but I'm currently using the verify back option in Acronis at the moment.
I'm using Acronis True Image 2016, build 6027, and I used this version to create both forms of bootable media. My computer is Win 10 Pro x64, on an modern homebuilt X79 desktop, booting in UEFI but I believe it will use legacy options as well. When I tired booting from the PE media, the device was not in the list of bootable options. When I used the basic meda, I believe it was booting it in UEFI.
At work I have used the PE media from the 2014 version of acronis sveral times without issues, and also have the 2014 isntalled on work computer, that I often use to restore images to drives. Is it likely my backups made with the 2016 version would work on the older (and much better/simpler) 2014 version?
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It's hit or miss. I've had good luck using ATIH 2016 to restore 2015 images, but I haven't had a 2014 to try from. In the past, older recovery media has not always worked with newer backups, but some do have luck with it.
I can't imagine why the PE media won't work, unless your BIOS is 32-bit only, but I don't see that being the case with your motherboard. I have an older Z77 gigabyte mobo and it lets me boot from either legacy bios or UEFI when I use F12 to bring up the manual boot override menu. Using legacy or UEFI, I am able to boot both the default linux recovery created in v6027 and the PE environment.
Which version of the Windows ADK did you download for Windows 10 to create your WinPE? At one point, users on Win 10 build 1511 (newest version), were having all kinds of WinPE issues (not just related to Acronis) as the version of ADK that was released with it was buggy. You might want to try uninstalling your current ADK and installing the original 10.0 ADK instead if you used the newer 10.1ADK.
Do you have another portable hard drive by any chance? I see no reason why you could not copy your orignal full backup, but not take your incrementals with it and put them on a new drive (just copy, don't cut and paste). Then boot to the recovery media and tell it to recover from it. If the backup is not corrupted, this really should work. It will help rule out if there is an issue with Acronis reading that particular external drive as well.
I'd like ot give you a copy of winPE i've created, but I'm not sure that is allowed as I can't verify your licenses. If you contact support though, they should be able to help create a custom PE for you as part of the backup and recovery support that is included with your license (even after the 30 days).
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/18623
5. Recovery issue
- Related to recovery issues with the full version of the product
- Free of charge
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- Not limited (Assistance with the recovery issue can be requested any time, even if you’re out of 30 days free support and don’t have PPI)
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Response time:
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Not sure if this will help any but I have had some issues with the AMI bios used on ASUS boards showing all the avialable boot options of attached drives. It seems that drilling down to the bottom of the boot options list will in most cases reveal the correct boot device although it is not plainly evident in the bios that you should do that. I have found that using the keyboard arrow keys work best in doing this rather than a mouse.
Also on 64 bit systems there will appear 2 boot devices, one or will boot in Legacy mode if the bios is set for that and the other will boot in UEFI mode. If your machine boots using UEFI make sure you choose the boot device that has UEFI in its description.
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Just headed out, but going to grab one of the work pe drives and try that, then I'll know if it's my computer or the media. Yeah the consumer motherboards bios's suck, at work we repair Toshiba business and consumer laptops (as well as apple/hp) and bios''s are son much easier to navigate to change between uefi and csm booting.
A quick Google shows a tonne of people not being able to see USB 3 hard drives using the basic media from 2016 acronis but no solutions for it.
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Ok, so I didn't resolve the issue with external drive not showing up, but I coopies the backups to an internal SATA connected drive and did the recover using the basic recovery media. Not the most idea, but back in business non the less!
Might have to buy another internal drive to keep a second copy of my back ups on if the Extneral Drive isn't going to work.
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Riley,
Glad you got it sorted. There is a possibility that there is corruption on the external disk. You should run chkdsk on the drive and/or manufacturer diagnostic tools to insure the drive is healthy and contains no errors.
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Agree with Enchantech. Or perhaps look at getting a new external enclosure and swapping the drive out. I see no reason why the default or winpe media should not be picking up an external drive - especially if you've tried both USB 2 and USB 3 ports on the system. Both versions have general drivers that should detect any external usb drive at start time, especially if the bios can see it already.
When you boot into the bios config menu (not the boot override menu), is the external drive listed there?
Is secure boot turned on by any chance? I'm guessing not since it let you boot from another internal drive, but still good to confirm.
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