Bare Metal Restore Not Working
So far not impressed. I did a full backup of my computer and did a full back of one of my customer's computers. Neither one will boot when I do a bare metal restore. Even to exactly the same hardware. Both work great when I backup and restore to/from a USB hard drive but as soon as I interject the cloud nothing boots.
The partitions seems to be there. The files seems to be there. They just won't boot. Startup Recovery can't repair them. Have tried Universal Restore until I am blue in the face. Has anyone been able to do a full backup and restore to the cloud and have it boot after restoring?
Jim, I have to confess that I do not do full backups to the Acronis Cloud, not for the reasons you are looking at, but more practically because of my upload speeds and size of data, so all my backups are local or to my NAS.
Having said that, I know that Bobbo did some testing in this area some months back (possibly last year now) and was able to do a successful restore from bare metal using the Cloud, but as far as I remember it was not as smooth as he had initially hoped that it would be. You may like to drop Bobbo a PM to ask if he can share his experience or can point you to the topic where he did all the testing?
I had some mixed luck with cloud full disk restores during testing with VM's. Same image, same VM - 2 of 5 restores booted directly after full disk restore - this was back with the first releases of 2017 though and I have not tried any recently.
A few things to make sure though...
1) did you boot the recovery media to match the OS install mode before recovering (UEFI boot or legacy boot) - that will be key
2) If so, do you have F8 for safemode booting? If so, try that - it might be the disk is "locked" from having Windows fastboot/fast start enabled since it uses hibernation instead of a a real shutdown and a locked hibernation file, can be trying to protect the disk. F8/safe mode can "unlock" the drive in this state. If you don't have F8, try to boot 3 times in a row and see if Windows gives you the option to press F8 instead and try again.
3) If those don't help, I found that you can force Windows to recover the system parition by putting into your Windows installer and using the advanced command prompt to use diskpart to mount the hidden system parition and assign a drive letter. Then format the partition. Run startup repair. Reboot. Run startup repair again, reboot. Run startup repair, reboot for the 3rd time. It always told me it was NOT SUCCESSFUl, but after the third time, it would usually boot again.
I'm with the others on the cloud backups - I do them (full disk for the OS), but am relying on them for data only (file/folder) recovery now. I tried Crash Plan years ago with similar "full OS" restores that didn't work well for me either. I like the offsite storage of Cloud for disaster recovery, but am stickign to my local backups (which are waaaaaaaaaaaay faster) for primary backup/recovery and relying on the cloud as a third option (1 - external usb backups, 2 - local NAS backups and 3 - Cloud backups).
Yes I have booted the correct media. The one I started with was my computer. I even gave Acronis every benefit of the doubt. My bare metal restore was to an exact replica. Same computer, both UEFI, same BIOS Rev, same amount of memory and identical hard drive. Did not boot. System Repair could not repair. It is Windows 10 so F8 was not an option but I did not try pulling the AC three times to send it in to Safe Mode. Will try that for lack of anything else to try.
I do a dual backup. The second being to a USB hard drive. As mentioned if I take the cloud out of the picture it restores and boots without issue. It would just really, really be nice if for once it worked as advertised. I don't really rely on the cloud for bare metal restore either but if they have issues with the cloud my guess is that they have issues in general.
Another thing I can't do is email more than one recipient on cloud backups. The "Send Test" works from the cloud and multiple recipients work when the backup is local but same thing. Emiling multiple recipients when the destination is the cloud doesn't work.
Then there is the bootable media. The bootable media will crash on a restore or never display the image after it has been selected. WinPE seems to work a lot better and will complete a restore but the computer still won't boot. Too many oddities. Just doesn't seem to be very stable or consistant. Don't even want to talk about their support.