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Issues running Hard Disk Sentinel and Acronis True Image 2018, 2017. Notes on 'on the fly cloning'.

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Please forgive me if this sort of post should be split up into multiple topics.  It was one issue that was troubleshooted between two machines and 2 (eventual) separate installs of the software.
 

Issues running Hard Disk Sentinel and Acronis True Image 2018, 2017.  Notes on 'on the fly cloning':

Aconis Active Protection seems to be a nice feature- in theory.  If you are a user who uses other disk utilities, you might want to take note of my experience.

I had to disable the Acronis Active Protection.  It doesn't Play nice with HD Tune Pro or Hard Disk Sentinel, at all.  Active Protection thinks these disk tools are making changes to the MBRs of your drives, and so Active Protection locks out the functionality of those apps - completely.  Acronis is going to need to come up with a whitelist of disk utility apps that will play nice with their Active Protetion.

I wasn't able to finally complete a disk clone with Acronis True Image 2018, until I simply stopped running Hard Disk Sentinel, or any other disk utils.  I had to even uninstall and reinstall True Image 2018, and rebooting each time - the app got jacked not being able to write to MBR sectors on the target drive. 

I was using version 5.01 of Hard Disk Sentinel.  For those that don't know what that app is:  it is like crystal disk mark, but offers real time monitoring of your drives temperature, health, and other SMART data.  It is handy for testing new and old drives, as it also does sector testing.

I hope acronis will look into this, as some power users do use these kind of tools.  Hard drives do get HOT during clone processes, and so it is nice to be able to monitor their SMART temp.

I also tried to do a disk clone to the same target device with TI 2017, and that version wouldn't even see the drive with Hard Disk Sentinel running.

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Notes on 'on the fly cloning':
The process worked pretty well, once I was able to finally- get it started.  I was able to clone from a Seagate Desktop HDD to a Seagate Enterprise v4 HDD.  It does indeed work with enterprise class hardware.

However:  note the time you started the clone process.  Any updated files or newly created files you are working on after you start the clone process, will NOT be copied to the target disk.  You'll get the old files prior to the start time, and none of the newly created files- will be copied to the target disk.

If you are a power user working on many documents during the on the fly clone: you're going to have to save your work to a secondary storage device such as a network drive, NAS, or flash drive.   Hopefully this is something Acronis can address in later versions of the sw.  The SW probably would have to do a lot of partition table comparing...

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You shouldn't expect Acronis to compile and maintain a list of apps to whitelist. You should add those programs to the list yourself. Run TI 2018 and click the Active Protection choice on the left. Click "Manage processes" and use the Add button to whitelist the apps you use that are having problems with Active Protection. I've needed to whitelist ImgBurn and RMPrepUSB. Thanks for pointing out HDTune and HDSentinel. I've added them to my list.

The active clone feature should then work as long as you first exit utilities like HD Sentinel. If it is running in the system tray, right click it and select exit. 

In addition to as for the Clone feature, a live or active clone is performed using Windows VSS which takes a snapshot of the disk from which the clone is then created.  That is the reason that any changes made during the clone process will not be included in the clone.  This is not going to change in the future for the product.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

I have since resolved the issue.  Thanks for your info, I wasn't aware the app even had a white list for this sort of thing. :)

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

No biggie,  I will just be aware in the future to note the time I started the clone.  I'm just glad the 'on the fly' concept, actually worked pretty well.

If one has system restore disabled, are VSS files still generated?  I was under the assumption that VSS only pertains to system restore?  I don't see any for my C: drive

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.15063]
(c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin list shadows
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2013 Microsoft Corp.

No items found that satisfy the query.

C:\Windows\system32>

 

 

Jim, Acronis can still use VSS regardless of System Restore (Protection) being enabled or disabled unless you have actually disabled the VSS background service - it will normally show as being 'Stopped' and set as 'Manual' for the Startup type.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

"Jim, Acronis can still use VSS regardless of System Restore (Protection) being enabled or disabled unless you have actually disabled the VSS background service - it will normally show as being 'Stopped' and set as 'Manual' for the Startup type....it will normally show as being 'Stopped' and set as 'Manual' for the Startup type."

Thanks for the info Steve.  I didn't know that.  That's exactly what I am seeing- the VSS service set to manual.

Aside vssadmin:  are there utilities to search for and locate VSS files?  I thought disabling sys restore did away with them.   Each time I format a disk in Win10 as NTFS- I'm losing about 1gb of 'wasted space' per 1tb of formatted space (nothing to do with Acronis or TI), which is too high.  I'm trying to figure out where this 'wasted space' is going.  sys restore and recyle bins are all off...

 

 

Jim, download and give the free Acronis VSS Doctor a spin and see what that tells you.  Otherwise, open up your System Protection settings and look at how much space you have allocated per each drive / partition shown?

2017-08-28 17_20_27-Control Panel_All Control Panel Items_System.png