Beware! Windows Deduplication is NOT supported by AB12
Just wanted to point out and warn all of you that one of the core functionalities of NTFS (present in Windows Server products since 2012) - Windows volume deduplication is NOT supported by Acronis Backup 12. Scenario is simple:
1) Perform backup of Windows virtual machine using AB12 (no matter VMware or Hyper-V) which includes deduplicated volume inside
2) Backup finishes (yes, product reports that the backup was sucesfull!)
3) Try to recover files using file/folder recovery option using web console
What happens then? Well... interesting thing. Each recovery attempt ends up with an error (recovered files have 0 bytes).
Even more interesting thing happens if you try to open the backup set from the host. You can browse through the files in the archive, you can see each file from the deduplicated volume, let's try to recover these... While trying to copy the file out of the archive it reports the corect size of the file but surprise, surprise... files are corrupted!!
If we would know that Windows dedupe is not supported we would never choose Acronis, as all of your competitors support this fully.
You call this an 'enterprise' product...? Really...?
@Vasily,
Indeed but there is one HUGE difference between Acronis and "any other backup vendor" and it is about the recovery process. If I use any other product and perform file/folder recovery then it mounts the image automatically in the background and lets me recover my files without any issue. In AB12 these files are corrupted and that's why in my opinion NTFS dedupe is not supported by your product.
If I would like to recover my files by recovering the complete image of VM (which can be over several TBs) and then mounting it manually or running the OS (keeping in mind that I have to separate it from production network to avoid IP conflicts) then I would go for Windows Backup and not Acronis.
We spent money for professional backup solution to make our work/life easier and not harder.
I would also advise you to update your product documentation and mention that files/folder recovery IS NOT POSSIBLE (both from web console and while accessing the archive file directly) is the backup was taken from deduplicated volume. Currently, there is nothing about such limitation.
Adik,
Thank you for the comments - I totally agree that the process has to be automated to simplify the backup product usage and we do have this feature in future plans (internal reference ID: ABR-86803 ). The limitation is already described in the documentatio in the topic where specifics of Windows 2012 support are listed: http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/AcronisBackup_11.7/index.html#23538.html . We're also going to add details to v12 documentation in future updates - the statements will be different compared to v11.7, since there are different solutions/workaround to this problem in v12 (e.g. mount a machine as VM rather than mounting volumes).
Thank you.
Any update on this?
I'm keen to use this on a new 2016 file server, and it's not really an option for me to recover as a VM - I'm using Citrix XenServer and you don't offer this with the recover option, just ESXi and Hyper-V.
I also think this process needs to occur in the background and seamless i.e. you should not have to worry about anything else except for recovering the data and not mounting VM Guests etc. Also understand the issue due to MS not having an external API.
Thanks