Why did Acronis True Image Home 2013 delete all of my backups?
I have 6 drives that are backed up on a schedule with Acronis True Image Home 2013. My system drive, application drive, 2 storage drives, and 2 VM drives. About 4.7 TB total.
Last week, I had need to restore my C: drive from the terabytes of backup files stored on my NAS. Acronis performed the restore just fine. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. Over the course of the coming day, Acronis True Image Home 2013 deleted ALL of the backups for four of the drives that had been backed up on my NAS. I'm talking "the file is gone" kind of deletion.
Thinking that perhaps Acronis just wasn't seeing the backup files, I checked the NAS. Yep, the files are GONE. Two of my storage drives and both of my VM drives are now without ANY backups at all. The files, roughly 4 TB of them, had been there prior to my restoring the C: drive.
In addition, despite having 60+ incremental backups + 2 full backups of my C: drive on the NAS, Acronis TIH 2013 claimed that my C: drive had not yet been backed up. ??? What's up with that?
So, Acronis, why did your software delete known good backup files in their entirety? How can I prevent this from happening in the future?
While I was quite happy with the performance of Acronis True Image Home 2013 before today (skeletal NAS support notwithstanding), I am not nearly as happy now. Where would I be if I had lost two drives? Restore my C: drive and let Acronis wipe out the backups for my other drive?
Has anyone had this happen to them? I would never have expected backup software to wipe out its own backups. Thank God that it was only my C: drive that had to be restored. If I had known that ATIH 2013 would delete multiple TB of backups without warning, I would have moved them to another directory on my NAS.
I have found that it is always best to make new tasks if the OS drive has been recovered at some stage, unless it is on the day that the latest image has occurred or just before the latest image was due.
Since it appears that restoring the system drive (which is where the backup record / log is stored) can cause significant issues for ATIH 2013, does anyone know if it is possible to host the backup record / log on the NAS? That would take care of the issue.
It would be nice if Acronis provided a way, other than by editing the cryptic record / log XML file, of adding or removing images from the backup records. Perhaps they could provide a way to add a file to, or remove a file from, a backup set.
My True Image Backup 2013 stopped working in April, 2013 without any notice what-so-ever and I found out quite by accident when I started getting error messages. I have contacted support but am unable to get help because my TS help expired and I must pay in order to get support, which I refuse to do. I'm beginning to believe that Acronis phones home and deliver information about my backups! Strange things are happening that are unexplainable. Acronis contacted me on Twitter to answer my question to them but still I haven't received an answer to my questions. I see that I'm not the only one with questions about the programs actions. Anyone else experienced the problem that I've experienced? I have turned off my external backup drive so that this software can't delete any of my backups. My next thing to do is to remove True Image from my computer since I can't get an answer from Acronis as to what happened with the backups just stopping with out any notice of any kind!
Amazon,
More specific information is required in order to offer suggestions.
When you say 'stopped working' exactly what happened and what does it now try to do?
What type of image and schedule have you made?
Where was the archive stored?
What steps did you take to recover the image and did you recover the complete image or just single partitions?
Had anything changed on the PC you were recovering to from a hardware point of view?
I really didn't do anything to change the way that True Image Backup worked, It was going through the motions of backing up but really wasn't backing up anything. Suddenly I started getting messages this month about my backups were incomplete and checked it out and found error messages that I sent to Acronis but they didn't do anything except tell me that in order for them to check it out I would have to pay for the services! I never tried to recover anything this just happened without my knowledge, my computer never crashed or anything therefore I had no reason to try and recover files. After this happened my hard disk was suddenly filled with data that I don't know what, how or where it is. I did an Acronis System Report, It was supposed to be found in C:\Program Files(X86)\Acronis\True Home\ System Report.zip. It's not there! I'm going to attempt to upload what's there...
"After this happened my C:\ hard disk was suddenly filled with data that I don't know what, how or where it is."
My hard disk was only half full until this happened, My backups were going to an external Drobo unit with two hard drives in it with lots of room left on them with the ability to add more hard drives as needed.
Happened to me. I schedule my backups to run automatically overnight. But this morning when I awoke, the folder was empty. Months of backups were gone. No error message, nothing.
Greetings,
By nature, the product does not delete back up images unless told to do so. Quotas, retention rules, deletion and/or consolidation are ways back ups can be deleted. Many times, users set rules not fully understanding the policy or mechanism being enforced. You may be able to determine what happened by reviewing your log files for last nights back up. Stating however, that your back ups were gone when you woke up is not enough information for us to help you understand what may have happened.
Stephen,
Have you looked inside the specific storage folder to confirfm their absence? It is possible for the task to be gone but the tib files to still exist.
Confirm to us which verson of TrueImage you are referring to?
Does the folder report itself as zero bytes in size? If it does, it is possible that Windows has had a hiccup and your SSID of your system is not the same as the SSID of the TI file. This normally happens if Windows has been reinstalled over itself, or Windows has been recovered to a different PC, or a user profile has changed in a dramatic fashion.
All of the above are easily remedied if that is the case.