Failing consolidation(s) & other matters
Using True Image 2013 for 2 months now, the product is not that solid that it feels at the first look.
What did I notice:
1) the consolidation process is a very time and resource consuming function. The whole backup has to be rewritten and not done by a partial cleaning;
2) True Image is primary a physical oriented backup program and not a logical backup program. Therefore the file backups are not as solid as the disk backup jobs;
3) the consolidation process often failes for all kind of reasons and therefor it is not very usefull;
4) my NAS is scanned by True Image via port 135,445 and 1900, although scanning is off.
Because True Image is not as solid as it promised to be, I fallbacked all file oriented backups to my old backup program AISBackup.
I had not always the time to directly put all of my experience(s) on paper, which makes the list above far from complete. In the basis True Image is a good product but there are too many errors that strongly undermines the quality and confidence.
Many of us prefer to avoid the consolidation process of having the program combining backups. Instead of using consolidation, we use the options to simply have the program delete the old backups automatically and maintain a revolving set of the newer backups. We refer to thhis process as keeping x number of backup chains.
Examples of this is shown in this link via figures 11-full; or 11-Inc; or 11-Dif; Depending upon whether you use only full, or full plus Inc, or Full plus Dif type backups. If you are new to 2013 or 2012, you may also find the other illustrations helpful.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/28705
If you want your backups to be able to create a replacement disk or recreate your old disk should a virus strike, you need a disk & partition backup and the backup should include all partitions--including any hidden partitions.
I fully agree with the post of Bart on saturday 19:01: "Acronis has to focus on the quality and reliability of the product and not focus to much on marketing related functionalities (like Cloud backup, etc). "
I've removed my ACRONIS TRUE IMAGE HOME EDITION 2012 + Plus PACK because it was unable to correct manage multivolume (DVD) partition C images and the ACRONIS support was not able to understand and resolve/fix my problem (!!).They offered me the 2013 free or refund Euros of 2012 + Plus PAck.
I've chosed the 2013, but it seems not so solid yet. Yesterday i've installed it following 34117 KB e 34876 KB and now in Win XP SP3 - Control Panel - Add or Remove Programs I cannot see ACRONIS 2013 in the program list!!!!
Acronis ha to improve his quality.
- Control Panel - Add or Remove Programs I cannot see ACRONIS 2013 in the program list!!!!
Look for True Image 2013 instead of Acronis TI 2013.
The True Image 2013 Plus Pack is also listed under the alphabet letter "T".
Acronis heard the yelps from 2012 issue and the 2013 has fixed many of the 2012 issues.
Thanks for your suggestions. I simpely like to make every day a incremental backup (first and only one is automatically a full backup) and keep the last 10-14 levels. Depending on the type of data and the % of idle data it could be most in-efficient the make full backups once at a time to accomplisch this.
Besides this, the consolidation process very often fails and is only recoverable by making a full backup again. Sometimes the validation proces also fails.
Because I setup reports by mail, I noticed a difference between the final status "execution failed" and the log status "green sign" even with "not succesfull" message inside. It could be that this concerns only file backup reports which I removed all of them.
To make a restore successfull the backup must be very reliable and scheduled automatically. At this moment I think that the core of True Image backup enigine is the same as Disk Director is using. Therefor the running backups (disk/file) are without problems. The problems True Images suffer are only concerning the backup maintenance (restores I have not done yet ...) part.
Besides this I like to know how True Image backups open and locked files, registry hives and security settings?
Besides this I like to know how True Image backups open and locked files, registry hives and security settings?
ATI has proprietary technology to examine changes at the sector level, and relies on the file system to determine the sectors that are used. Non-supported file systems can only be backed up sector-by-sector (all sectors are backedup, regardless whether the OS is tracking them as used of not).
Since the drivers access the disk information directly, ATI doesn't rely on Windows security settings, locked files or other logical OS information.
Certain file systems are replaced in the backup by "empty" containers of the exact same size as the original file, but no actual data is moved from the source to the backup: page file, hibernation file, for example.
The above information is valid for disk and partition backup. For file backups, it is a different story. For these, ATI users the logical file information like other file backups and will stumble on specific file cases.
Thanks for your reply. I think this confirms my feeling that the core engine is the same that is used for Disk Director and is developed for a long time now. This makes it also a very reliable and efficient part of ATI.
It's a pity that this feeling is strongly undermined by the relibility of the backup configuration and maintenance management in combination with the support for file level backup. On this part ATI has a strong opponent in AISBackup together with File Acces Manager (FAM, a very efficient and reliable snapshot tool) or the standard Windows VVS service. I use it for more then 10 years now and it never let me down. Because of my believe that physical dumps are better for system & boot partitions I started to investigate ATI. From the start I noticed directly the efficient way of backup and bought a license.
Now I use ATI for Windows partitions and AISBackup for all other (file) backups. The only thing that is troubling me is the ATI inefficient backup version control and consolidation.
Professionally I am working with IBM TSM backup and archiving tool.