Can't use it, can't uninstall it
You'd think that by 2022, "backups" would be a solved problem.
Cyber Protect Home Office has a critical defect that I can't work around: if an external drive gets unplugged, then CPHO attempts a backup on schedule and can't find the drive, it will never be able to back up to that drive again, even after it has been plugged in. This isn't even an unusual scenario in the world of making backups, but Acronis can't deal with it. It just repeatedly asks me to plug in the drive, which is already plugged in (and accessible, and writable, yes I checked all of that). This is 100% reproducible, trivially.
The only thing that gets it working again is a repair install, which presumably must be restarting some process that fails when a drive is unplugged. Restarting the services and the UI are not sufficient to get it working again. A repair install works every time, but I can't be doing repair installs all the time.
I want to get this software off my system completely, but even that doesn't work. Removing it from "Add/Remove Programs" fails with the unhelpful message "The parameters are not valid." The clean-up tool also doesn't work: when it gets to the "Removing drivers" step, it just hangs forever.
So now I have this software on my machine that I can't trust and can rarely use, and I also can't get rid of it and get it out of my life forever.
Support helpfully offers to let me schedule a session with them between the hours of 3 AM and 6 AM in my time zone. You have got to be kidding.
What do I need to do to REALLY get this junk off my machine forever?
In the Protection panel, Turn off Acronis Protection completely (which may take a little time to be actioned) to ensure protection isn't getting in the way of uninstalling!
You should activate Windows Defender after doing so unless you have another antivirus solution in place.
I have no such panel. The only panels are Backup, Archive, Sync, Tools, Account, Settings, and Help. None of these panels contain a panel called "Protection". I have a different anti-virus solution (ESET) running already, however; perhaps that is why.
I have, of course, tried disabling the anti-virus temporarily during installation and removal, to no effect.
Can you post some screen shots of what you are seeing please?
The only time that I have seen no Protection option in either ACPHO or ATI 2021 is when background services have been hacked to remove them.
Steve Smith wrote:Can you post some screen shots of what you are seeing please?
The only time that I have seen no Protection option in either ACPHO or ATI 2021 is when background services have been hacked to remove them.
I assure you I haven't hacked anything.
This is what I see in the UI. There's nothing here about Protection and never was. I did a very ordinary install on Windows 11, though I do have a different anti-malware solution running. If it's supposed to be there, it's not, and not because of anything I did or didn't do.
Nicklas, thanks for the screen image. I can only repeat the suggestions that I gave initially here and ignore step 2. about the Protection settings but try the further steps.
Steve Smith wrote:Nicklas, thanks for the screen image. I can only repeat the suggestions that I gave initially here and ignore step 2. about the Protection settings but try the further steps.
I was finally able to uninstall Acronis and get a fresh install. Here's what I had to do:
- Created a restore point
- Removed all backups from the list
- Stopped all services
- Set all services to "disabled"
- Killed all remaining processes
- Renamed Scripts and Database to .bak (see https://kb.acronis.com/content/60915)
- Manually started the scheduler2 service
- Used the task editor to do a 'task zap'
- Stopped the scheduler service again
- Rebooted
- Uninstalled using the Remove Programs control panel - it finally worked this time but left cruft behind
- Cleaned up using the clean-up tool - also worked this time and also left cruft behind
- Manually removed the Acronis directories from Program Files and AppData - in doing this, I found that some other processes (COM Surrogate and something else that I've forgotten) had a couple DLLs from one of these folders still open. Killed these processes so these files and folders could be completely removed.
- Rebooted
- Did a full fresh install running the installer as an administrator
- Imported the existing backup from the disk and reconfigured it
My best guess is this entire mess was caused by the installation error from the first time I tried to install Acronis on this machine, whose cause is still undetermined, but it appears to have affected the installation of the Acronis-licensed BitDefender DLLs, as my event log was full of complaints about bad parameters in running them, and the missing Protection tab hints at the same.
Given that this disaster of an install happened to a brand new Windows 11 machine with a pristine Windows 11 Pro install, I'd say Acronis still has some testing it needs to do.
For me the cleanup utility worked perfectly.
Even though it's very annoying that you have to go this extra mile.
Man this is the worst software ever.
I am unable to unistall it.
I am so frustrated.... been trying for 24 hours now.