Recovered files have additional characters in filenames

Hi Tony,

A ~ at the beginning of a file normally indicates an open version of the file (such as a Word docment or Excel spreadsheet).  That could make sense during the restore process as the files may be marked as Temp during the recovery.  However, I have not seen a file with ~ appended at the end of the file extension (maybe I just have never noticed it though).

I am guessing the names will be normal when the process is complete. If time was not an issue, I would suggest stopping the restore and testing a sample restore of a much smaller subset of the data and see what the outcome is first.  Alternatively, when not restoring, you should be able to right click and "mount" the tib as a drive letter and navigate the contents to see how it is showing the files correctly prior to the restore process.... or double click on the .tib and Windows Explorer should allow you to navigate the contents as well.

When I do a file/folder recovery, I typically just mount the .tib and then copy/paste out of it so that may be why i have not seen this behavior.  Perhaps someone else will chime in before the restore completes, but if not, let us know the end results. 

Thanks. I'll pin my hopes on the software returning the names to normal when the process is complete. That is still apparently almost 4 hours away so I will return later with the news.

As luck would have it, all turned out well for after the Recover had finished, all the recovered filenames were with their normal 3-character extensions. Quite strange behaviour for a relatively straightforward piece of software such as TI. I wouldn't mind knowing why it happened. As I may have already mentioned, the size of the recovered data was almost 1 Tb. Also, I originally elected to have backed up only two key data folders, My Documents and My Pictures. My approach to recovery was fairly brutal in that I merely asked TI to recover the entire backup in one go rather than doing it in bits and pieces. I was also unaware of the possibility of setting the speed of the process, which eventually took14 hours. Perhaps I could have taken steps to have cut down that time, but that did not appear to be either obvious or intuitive.

Thanks for reporting back Tony.  Glad it all worked out in the end.  

There are a lot of settings possible for backup and/or recovery.  They've tried to "simplify" the interface to make it less daunting for new users or non-techy people who just want it to be easy and a lot of long time users can't stand the new interface as a result.  However, there are still a bunch of options and being familar with the different settings and learnign the product are definitely good to do.  I suspect the file names are Temp place holders until the job is complete.  When recovering a full disk or partition, it is completely locked until the job is done (to avoid the user adding or removing things in the meantime which could have a negative impact on the recovery success).  I suspect that the recovery of files/folders is somewhat similar for the locations where the data is being recovered to. 

900Gb of restore is certainly a lot of data to recover at once - some may like to do it at once so they can set and forget.  Others, may want to break it into smaller chunks to break up the process and have a little more control during the times that are useful for them.  The good news, is that you now know and so might others who happen across this thread and I'll be able to pass it along if others have similar questions in the future. 

This happened to me. I needed to restore the contents (photos) of an entire storage drive, and two attempt to restore everything resulted in two sets of each photo followed by the tilde and random letters. The file could be viewed if I renamed the file by stripping out the added characters, so how could they be "open files"? I solved the problem by bypassing recover with the File Explorer copy and paste method. Laborious, and very slow, then I still had to delete the renamed files in each of numerous folders. So, my impression of Acronis is that it doesn't work as it should. Can anyone explain how to get a reliable recover? Going forward, I'm looking for better software.

Hi Janet,

If all recoveries result in the ~ on all files, I would definitely open a support ticket with Acronis to investigate.  At a minimum, seeing the behavior and being able to review your system report may help resolve the issue if there is a bug.  However they may be able to help your revover them without this issue as well.

Questions for you...

1) What type of backup was this - disk, parition or file/folder? 

2) Where did you recover the files to - the original location or a new location?   (Try a new location as test - permissions may be an issue)

3) How was the restore done - through the GUI or the recover media?  Have you tried to "mount" the backup as a volume and then check to see if the file names are correct or screwey there?  If they look good, can you copy/paste folders to a NEW location (I always recommend a new/temp location for the recovery and then moving them from the temp location to the orginal once you're sure you have the recovery files you need if you're doing a file/folder recovery and the mounting of the .tib should help make this pretty easy). 

I'm recovering a bunch of files as well (3 TB worth!) and finding the same issue. Just to answer some earlier questions, I'm recovering one folder from a previous backup, restoring to a new drive. Even finding the folder I wanted was a challenge, Acronis didn't show it as an option when I went into the backup procedure, so I had to do a search for it and then it found it. Looking at the drive in Explorer all the file names were normal. Restore was done through the GUI. I tried just doing a copy and paste, but it's 100x slower (two days to barely even start the process), and crashed in the middle of the night part way through. Copy and paste all file names were fine.