Caution: Acronis 12/12.5 didn't backup what it should - big desaster!
On last Friday we tried to find a folder in Acronis 12.5 backups which a user deleted accidentally. We browsed thru several backkups in the Acronis web interface (which was really slow).
The backup scheme was grandfather, father and son with incrementeal from Mon - Thu, differential an every Fri and complete on every last Fri per month. The retentions were 5 for daily incrementeal, 7 for weekly differential and 6 months for monthly.
As I initial mentioned we tried figure out an accidentally deleted folder. But then we were really shocked: browsing to the backups we saw that Acronis 12.5 didn't save the backups we thought! Sometimes the drive letters were incorrect (eg. F instead C) and lots of the backups were empty! Even some complete partitions weren't backup! That concretely means Acronis told us "Yes I've done this backup job correctly" but the result was there were no backups.
The affecting company is about 60 people. Imagine we trusted on correct function of Acronis 12.5 and would have a desaster recovery!
As a result I removed Acronis 12.5 immediately and downgraded to version 11.7. The backup time and compression level of 11.7 is a little bit lower than in 12.5 but with the goal of working backups we're accepting this.
For heavens seek I recognized this early enough.
Unfortunately, I was shocked so much that I removed 12.5 immediately and downgraded 11.7 due to the fact of having the need of working backups.
I didn't open a case at acronis. Maybe it's a malfunction coz of upgrading from 12 to 12.5.
I'm sure the backup plan (Grandfather-Father-Son) was correctly. Maybe it was a catalogue issue. But I see drive letters they never existed. Another possibility is that 12.5 didn't manage the different backup types (full, incremental, differential) correctly.
11.7 is working again. The compression rate and speed of 11.7 is a little bit lower than 12.5 but the most important thing: it produces WORKING backups.
The only warning on 11.7 I'm getting is:
volume : D:, fstype : REFS_V1, $module : disk_bundle_vs_50064. File filters are not supported.
Drive D: is a ReFS volume with Exchange 2016 on it. Does it mean that 11.7 is not supporting VSS in Exchange on ReFS?
Hi,
Thank you for the additional information. It's hard to guess what might went wrong, but probably the issue is related to ReFS filesystem which support is limited (same for both 11.7 and 12.5): files/folders exclusions (File filters) during backup and resize of such volumes during recovery is not supported. However since the VSS snapshot is taken by Microsoft VSS service, it doesn't matter for Acronis Backup whether the file system is ReFS on the volume - we rely on the Microsoft VSS snapshot of the volumes to read data from it. The data should be read properly from ReFS volumes during volume/disk backup and files/folders recovery (but not exclusions) should also work.
Thank you.