Acronis True Image Home 2011 used with Diskeeper 2011 Pro
I have used Acronis True Image Home for many years now, upgrading regularly at some expense as each new release has appeared. My computer currently has ATI Home 2011 installed, and I have to say it's been less than inpressive and has caused me all sorts of problems ranging from today's frequent state that means when the cursor is placed over a version timeline entry, no balloon giving details of the backup appears as it should. Close and re-open the application, and it works OK for a time until another event upsets it again.
I have had frequent backups failing close to the end of validation with errors such as "failed to open data stream" etc. Auto clean-up seems to be a disaster zone according to other posters, and certainly my backups clogged up the HDD when the oldest ones should have been removed by ATI! I could go on. Let's hope the next build gets it right or I am going to jump ship.
This post relates to the use of Diskeeper 2011 Pro when used together with ATI Home 2011 as part of my PC house-keeping regime. The latter is set to backup my System partition twice a week using a Custom scheme. Because of the Intelliwrite and Automatic Defragmentation features of Diskeeper, files are constantly on the move, so each Differential image tends to be close in size to the initial Full backup in each Version Chain. Not an issue as long as the older ones drop off.
Once a month (roughly), I do essential routine house-keeping on the computer to get rid of any rubbish. I then use ATI to backup both System & Data drives, using a Version Chain scheme.
This process ran for some months, but recently I have had my backups failing to validate, and I feel this may have occurred since I upgraded to Diskeeper 2011 Pro, with its highly automated monitoring of the state of each hard drive, and subsequent re-arrangement of its data.
From various forums, including this one, various posters claim incompatibility between these two software applications. Now Diskeeper runs fine, never causes me any grief; right now ATI is a right PITA!
Is anyone able to comment with authority on Acronis recommended backup strategy when using their product in conjunction with Diskeeper 2011 Pro?
This thread has been active for so long without a response that frankly I had all but forgotten about it! Good to hear from you though, especially as a Diskeeper "expert".
The four active drives on this PC each have Diskeeper keeping an eye on them, with Intelliwrite enabled and I-FAAST disabled on each. Drive C: has a scheduled Acronis backup twice weekly to Drive M:, and both Drives C: & D: are backed up roughly once a month (manually after routine housekeeping) to Drive N:. Drives M: & N: are partitions on the same physical HDD. I use ATI Home 2011 to create the images.
I was unable to find and enable the VSS Mode within Diskeeper that you refer to. Please be more specific! I have DK 2011 Professional (15.0.956.0) running.
Thanks
I'm glad to help! That configuration sounds good and I think we can stick with those settings. As for the VSS mode, we should enable that and to do so you'll want to open Diskeeper, select the Action button from the top-most menu and then go into the Configure Diskeeper option. From there, you can select the Diskeeper Configuration Properties and then select the Volume Shadow Copy option in this new window. There you'll find the options to "Defragment using VSS defragmentation method" for both the Automatic Defragmentation as well as the Manual Defragmentation. By changing both options to that setting, that should have Diskeeper approach the volumes in a fashion more appropriate for snap-shot type backups.
I hope that helps!
Many thanks for your very quick reply. Much appreciated! Nope, still can't find any reference to VSS Mode. If I do as you say, I get the DK Configuration Properties pane on screen OK, with Properties at left. Entries run from "General - About Diskeeper 2011" at top thru 9 entries to "Defragmentation Options" at bottom of the list. But no VSS Mode. Sure I am running the correct DK version to have this feature? Or perhaps it has been disabled at installation for some (unknown reason). I do recognise the term however, now that you have mentioned it means Volume Shadow Copy.
I'm sorry that option is not present. It may be that it was somehow disabled during the installation. Not to rob others who may follow this post but I would like to investigate this directly if that'd be okay. Would you be willing to write me directly at jbuck@diskeeper.com?
It's possible that this hinges upon the Operating System you're running but I'd need to look into this further.
I'm sorry that option is not present. It may be that it was somehow disabled during the installation. Not to rob others who may follow this post but I would like to investigate this directly if that'd be okay. Would you be willing to write me directly at jbuck@diskeeper.com?
It's possible that this hinges upon the Operating System you're running but I'd need to look into this further.
Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
Available on the Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista operating systems, VSS provides the ability to create snapshots, or point-in-time (PIT) copies, of shares and volumes. These snapshots are images of the data on the disk as it looks at a particular point in time. By keeping these images of data, you can quickly recover individual files or entire volumes directly from the disk as they appeared when the snapshot was taken.
Thanks for your input re VSS, Bob. However, my brief reading of the Wikipedia page "Shadow Copy" states that... "The Volume Snapshot Service was first added to Microsoft Windows in Windows XP". I use Win XP Pro on this machine. Running the command line utility vssadmin list providers certainly shows "MS Software Shadow Copy provider 1.0", so the VSS feature may well be present on my PC!
But I feel this may be a red herring anyway... I think my issue is with ATI Home 2011, not DK 2011 Pro. Why? I have loads of disk space on the USB 3.0 hard drive allocated for backups. Sometimes a backup will apparently run OK, but then fails to validate as it has been set to check after writing the file. If this same file is later validated as a separate task, it usually checks out as OK. Doesn't stack up really! It is either OK or it is NOT! A corrupt image is worse than useless.
Also I have set up my backup tasks to use Automatic Cleanup. The rules I have set are routinely ignored by ATI.
No, I can live with "ballooned" .tib images, because there is lots of storage space available. And I fully understand why the differential images can be quite large, given DK activity. What I cannot tolerate is ATI's apparently inconsistent validation of these images, and its failure to apply the Automatic Cleanup settings I have chosen.
No-one from Acronis has responded to this enquiry, now some months old. But I am pleased to know that Diskeeper Tech Rep is happy to help me look further into this. I would certainly like to know how best to configure both these applications to get my drives efficient and backed up successfully. I'll PM ASAP as suggested.
And Bob, thanks again for your comment.
I thank you as well Bob. Alos BigN, I did some further research as to the missing Shadow Copy option within Diskeeper itself. I applied a copy of the Diskeeper 2011 Pro to a test XP machine and also found that the option I described wasn't present. I believe the assumption was made that with a Professional edition of Diskeeper on XP, that VSS wouldn't likely come into play. Despite that, there are still options that we can affect for this to estbalish the VSS Method of Defragmentation but we'd need to change the settings through REGEDIT.
To do this, you can:
1. Open REGEDIT
2. Drill down to \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Diskeeper Corporation\Diskeeper\UserSettings\
3. At the tail end of this list are two entries: VSSAutoDefragOption and VSSManualDefragOption
4. Change the value of these two entires to "1" (decimal)
5. Lastly, you'll need to close REGEDIT and go into the Services.msc and restart the Diskeeper service
This shoudl get Diskeeper to operate in the fashion I'd hoped where a "snapshot" backup system is in place.
Thank you. My DK is currently running a Manual Defrag on drives M: & N:, so I'll let these finish before messing about with registry settings! Will get back to you ASAP.
To wrap this thread... I make the following points:-
Further to my last post #10, I have since read elsewhere on this forum that defragging backup images buys very little in terms of enhanced performance. In fact, it is a potentially risky strategy!
I have now implemented Diskeeper Tech Rep's VSS registry tweaks. I then restarted the DK service and started my backup tasks as described earlier. They both completed and validated without any errors arising. This in itself is good. But significantly, and I don't pretend to understand why this should be the case, ATIH is now following the Automatic Cleanup rules I set for my Drive M: images. Result!
I have a comment I'd like to add with regard to scheduling, though my guess is that this may not be an issue with Diskeeper retail. But isn't the defragger with Win7 supplied by Diskeeper?
Anyway, my problem is that the default defrag program which ships with Win7 allows you to schedule defrags on any day of the month, to include "last day." That works fine in tandem other cloning programs, because I can set the defrag on the last day of each month and can set a scheduled cloning operation to start with a full backup on the first day of each month. I can then set incremental backups to occur once (or serveral times) per week throughout the month without having to worry about a defrag operation causing issues.
HOWEVER... With ATI the scheduling will not allow this. I can only start a full backup version once every X number of weeks. Because of this there is no way to make it so defrags never interfere with incremental or differential backups when utilizing backup chains on a monthly schedule. :(
Hi Gork. Yes, I also believe the Windows defragger is derived from Diskeeper, perhaps Diskeeper Lite. I am no expert on this so will leave it for others to offer a solution to your problem! But I will say that the big advantage of the retail versions of Diskeeper is that the program's IntelliWrite feature tries to avoid fragmented files being created in the first place. As the program is constantly active in the background, it is inevitable that file movement on the drive will occur as it keeps everything optimized, so in a sense the use of incremental or differential backups are probably not ideal when DK is running! In my case, I have lots of disk space and really only want to be able to restore to a fairly recent image anyway.
Why can you not do your scheduled defrag, and then your scheduled backup some time later on the SAME day? Then you could do these at any time of the month, not just "last day" + "first day" as per your post. Just a thought.
Why can you not do your scheduled defrag, and then your scheduled backup some time later on the SAME day? Then you could do these at any time of the month, not just "last day" + "first day" as per your post. Just a thought.
I need to run backups once per week. So while your suggestion would work with the very first backup, ATI and defrag would no longer be in sync after that. This is because defrag only lets me choose a specific day of the month or "last day" while ATI does not. I can only set ATI to start a new chain every X number of weeks. So if I defrag on, say, 9/1 and have ATI set up to run a clone afterwards, defrag will run again on 10/1 but ATI will clone incrementally once per week until 10/6 when it will run a full clone again. Not a big deal, YET. But the next month, defrag will run on 11/1, just before the final incremental clone on 11/3 - thus causing a problem.
If I may be so bold, this is quite the blatant oversight on the part of Acronis. My reasoning? It is well known that defragging causes problems with incremental/differential clones. And Acronis is writing software which runs on a very popular OS which is not only set by default to defrag on a nightly basis, but can't be set to defrag every X number of weeks, rather, only on a specific day of the month. Granted, I'm not sure how the release date of ATI 2011 correlated to the release date of Win7... But either way, I haven't read mention made of this incongruity yet.
Hi Gork,
To add some information, as bigN pointed out, the built-in defragmenter with Windows over the years has utilized defragmentation engines that were developed by Diskeeper several years ago. Over those years, the built-in defragmenter has been tweaked as has Diskeeper itself so I would be remiss to compare the built-in of Windows 7 to Diskeeper or say that it is still Diskeeper, deep down.
Diskeeper itself, has several features not found in the built-in though and as BigN pointed out, the biggest feature to help as far as the incremental/differential clones go, is the IntelliWrite function. IntelliWrite was born partly from the difficulty in defragmenting these environments. Because IntelliWrite can act to prevent a large percentage of new incoming fragments, many files are written contiguously from the outset. This process doesn't invoke any sort of backup of the files since they're not considered to have been "changed" the way they would if they were defragmented normally.
The options that I originally described for the "VSS Mode" focus Diskeeper's attention to defragmenting a drive differently. Realizing that to much activity can cause a bloat in the backups, this Mode sets up Diskeeper to take a more conservative approach to fragmentation and primarily focuses Diskeeper on tackling the more pressing fragments (those subtracting the most performance of the machine). The VSS Mode along with IntelliWrite setup Diskeeper to work more smoothly with this type of environment. In some cases, it may even be prudent to disable the Auto Defrag and only go with IntelliWrite but more often, VSS Mode and IntelliWrite together would be recommended.
Lastly, should someone come across this post for future reference, I'd like to note that the REGEDIT steps described above should not be necessary in all cases; only those running Diskeeper on a Windows XP system. In more cases, the VSS Mode can be configured directly through the Diskeeper GUI.
@Diskeeper Tech Rep
Thank you for your followup. I do understand the features of Diskeeper you have explained in this thread. And my guess is that if I didn't want to use these advanced features that Diskeeper would probably have a more robust way for me to schedule defrags anyway, so I could make them more inline with ATI's less robust scheduling process.
Though I applaud Diskeeper's people for coming up with ideas to address the issue at hand, this unfortunately doesn't change my opinion that ATI has kind of "dropped the ball" with regard to an obvious problem in backup scheduling and the default defragging utility shipped with the very popular Win7 operating system, as I described previously.