Active Protection - Manage exclusions
I recently installed the latest version of Adobe Photoshop which includes Adobe Camera Raw version 12 and it seems that Acronis True Image, Active Protection interferes with the performance of Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) v12. If I turn off the Active Protection then ACR runs fine. It has been suggested to me that I should be able to have Active Protection turned on but exclude the Adobe programs from being monitored and then ACR should run fine. I have tried adding the program names (with wildcards) and also the folder for the programs, but it doesn't seem to work. ACR still runs poorly. See attached screen shot. Am I doing this right? Why doesn't it work?
@Peter: Thanks for posting that! Your post finally helped me after two months of searching to find out why I have severe performance issues with Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (part of Photoshop) when GPU acceleration is turned on! Although my PC is new and has a powerful Nvidia graphics card.
Switching Active Protection off (I'm running the newest version of True Image 2020) makes Adobe fast again. I'm using True Image since ages but was not aware Acronis introduced a ransomware protection and switches it on by default.
Active Protection is a total piece of crap, sorry to say, it costed weeks of my life and without this post here I would have never found the culprit.
I agree with Thomas!!!! with Photoshop and Lightroom on my W10 Laptop with Acronis True Imagehas not been able to open a RAW file in months, even after reinstall of PS and LR and disabling Graphics CPU enable. I spent an entire day reinstalling my OS and programs (including Acronis). Then, I reproduced problem on my desktop (which has Photoshop, Lightroom and Acronis True Image. This "coincidence" focused my search leading me to this post. Disabling Active Protection solved this for me so I am indebted.
I have been a fan of Acronis since 2006 (v.10). It's beyond comprehension that the program installs an unrelated monitoring program and then turns in on by default without any permission or notification. The Acronis Knowledge Base 60452 states:
Q: Does Acronis Active Protection conflict with other security programs that I have installed?
A: You can have a third-party security product running in parallel with Acronis Active Protection. They do not conflict with each other for resources and do not create an extra overhead on the system.
That is wrong.
If anyone from Acronis is monitioring this board, please either make this default OFF (or provide a clear notification of this non-core software function during installation). And, fix your knowledge base page - your program has potential to conflict with legitimate installed programs - since this froze my computer, I suspect this is a bug in your software rather than a "false-positive" ransomware" hit.
If someone from Acronis would like to talk to me about my experience with this, contact me through my account information.
P.S.
This behaviour seems to be triggered by any program that manipulates videos or photos. You can white list executables that you want to be unhindered. The problems is that rather than blocking the program, in which case there is a popup that allows you to tell Active Protection that the program is OK, merely monitors what the program is doing in a way that produces a substantial slowdown.
While I can understand one of my programs being monitored (it is uncommon), I cannot understand why programs such as PhotoShop and Power Director are caught.
Ian
I have managed to come to a happy (sort of) coexistence with Active Protection. I manage the process for all version of Photoshop and Bridge and ask Active Protection to not interfere with them. This seems to work OK, but I have to remember, whenever I update or reinstall Acronis True Image to revisit thsi screen and make sure that the settings are still there, otherwise PS performance, especially ACR, will suck.
A long time back I suggested that you should be able to save the exclusions and then restore them, like you can do for backup task specifications.
Ian
I think Acronis Active Protection causes more damage to users than it potentially prevents. If you are an average user, chances you discover Active Protection is screwing up your system are next to zero.
My recommendation to Acronis would be to focus on its core capability which is backup instead of bloating the product.
I as well question whether Active Protection (AP) is the right approach to fight ransomware. AP monitors file I/O and I guess if I/O exceeds some threshold the program causing it is seen as suspicious by AP. This ongoing monitoring slows down your PC and might identify the wrong programs. Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw are all known for heavy I/O and I guess this is the reason why AP blocks them.
And: If AP does not recognize ransomware than your data is gone.
Slightly off topic:
I try as well to protect myself against ransomware but use a different approach. I have a Synology NAS and are using the continuous backup solution which comes with the product (Synology Drive). It copies continuously changed files to the NAS. But it does it asynchronously, so it is not blocking Photoshop. I can specify how many versions I would like to keep, currently I save the last 32 versions. I additionally can specify that I am not interested in versions older than a certain time frame – maybe a year. The volume where the continuous backup is ending is not accessible directly by Windows users – so the ransomware cannot reach it.
In addition, I use True Image because it allows me to create backups which are encrypted and packed in a series of files. Again, these backup files are ending on my NAS which replicates the encrypted backup files to Microsoft One Drive. These cloud backups are just an insurance my house burns down.