McAfee Endpoint Encryption - Acronis True Image 2014 does not work
I have been a customer for many years doing disk clone backups and my employer has now moved to McAfee endpoint encryption. Acronis does not recognize the source disk for cloning any more. There is nothing in the support forums or FAQs that I could find on this issue. The error message says "Cannot complete the cloning. The selected partition(s) on the source drive cannot be resized to fit a smaller drive because the source file uses an unsupported or broken file system." All I want is a bare metal, sector-to-sector disk image (clone) please. How do I do that? I cannot see any way to do so though a FAQ from 2006 says it's possible. The hard drives are EXACTLY the same size.
Acronis: Please help.
Thank you for your suggestion. I ran chkdsk with both options checked in Windows and it came back after I rebooted that the volume was clean. I also ran a SMART check using Seatools for Windows (the disk manufacturer's utility) and that was PASS. McAfee's EEPC is full disk encryption and so partitions, folders, files, are all encrypted - the disk contents and the disk structure. Which is why I need to be able to do a bare metal image of the source drive and I cannot figure out how that is achieved by Acronis True Image 2014. I boot to the Acronis True Image 2014 image on a USB stick so that Windows is not involved at all. The McAfee EEPC is v7.0.1.354, which is newer than anything mentioned in the Acronis FAQs. Nonetheless if Acronis had a file-system independent, metal to metal imaging capability I believe that would work. Does it? Thank you
You will not be able to clone. You need to do a Disk Mode backup and then restore. Since the disk is encrypted, you need to select the check box "Sector by Sector" for the backup. This will mean the backup tib file will be the same size as the source disk. All free space will be backed up. Your backup destination needs to have more space than the full size of your source disk. This is all necessary because TI can't understand the file structure of the encrypted disk.
Thank you. Let me explain why I clone. I am on the road all the time, usually internationally. There two things can happen to me: disk failure, and laptop stolen. I want to be up and running as fast as possible and a disk clone works perfectly in both cases. For the disk failure it's literally minutes to swap drives (and I have done that). For a stolen laptop all I need is a new laptop that's the same type - there might be a bit of fiddling with drivers if the hardware has changed but that's all. I used to do backups but stopped when I realized that my protection needed to be at the drive level not file level.
Unfortunately for you Mustang is correct. Clone will not work on an encrypted disk.
Thank you for your advice. It's going to end up being unfortunate for Acronis I suspect, because I will find a way to do what I want to do even if it means booting to Linux and using dd. More tedious and no UI but if Acronis cannot do it, I have to do something, and if that works then I won't be buying any more Acronis. Perhaps people who want to do disk clones after full disk encryption is too small a target market to worry about for them, and I wouldn't blame them if that's their thought.
I downloaded Ubuntu, put it on a USB stick, booted from it, and then used the dd command to perform a sector level image backup. It all worked perfectly. Thank you for your assistance. Problem solved.