ATI 2016 failures solved by ATI 2010
After a crash, I used ATI 2016 to restore my HP DV7-3111ea laptop to various backups, one made the night before the crash, two last January, and one end of 2013. Only the last worked, and not very well. All the others failed validation. Then, by a happy accident, I misunderstood something I read about WordPerfect files, dug out my old Vista machine with a circa 2010 ATI, made a bootable DVD from it, and used it to restore the very latest backup I had made.
With my computer working better than ever, I made a new Acronis backup.
Then I carried out a general tidyup (involving Dropbox), and made some mistake, which made my computer really slow. I could probably have sorted it out, but I decided it would be quicker to restore the new backup to an internal HD in a caddy. I tried validating with ATI 2016. Result: failure. I tried with ATI 2010. Result: success.
This ATI 2016 problem must be causing a huge loss of time to many other users. Can someone please sort it out?


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Steve Smith wrote:With regards to the Acronis bootable rescue media, if you have registered your Acronis True Image products to your Acronis Account, then you should also find them listed on the account web page with download links to the rescue media and installation programs if needed.
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I have always used bona fide downloads of programmes, after payment.
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I am not sure from your comments if you are saying that your ATIH 2016 backups failed validation with the 2016 product but validated correctly with the 2010 product, or whether you restored the 2016 backup using the 2010 boot media?
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All attempts at validation using ATI 2016 failed. All attempts at restoration using ATI 2016, bar one, failed. All attempts at both validation and restoration using ATI 2010 succeeded.
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If it was the latter, then that is surprising as it seems to contradict KB document: 1689: Backup Archive Compatibility Across Different Product Versions which states that ATIH 2016 is backward compatible with only as far back as 2013 and Acronis make no promise on forward compatibility of older products with newer archive files.
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Not my problem.
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It is one to remember if true!
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Some have reported validation fails when it occurs directly after a backup. The work-a-round is to try validating sepearately in Windows... better yet, using the offline recovery media since it runs completely outside of Windows. Another surefire way to validate your backup is to "mount" it in Windows and if you can navigate the directories, it's good to go. Alternatively, double click on the .tib file and Windows explorer should open it up and you should be able to navigate the backup that way as well. If you can - the image is good.
I mean this with no offense, so please don't take any...
I don't know how many times I've stressed this in the forums, but it is not wise to wait until a failure to test the recovery of backups. There's no reason that 2016 would be any less capable of backing up and restoring a desktop or laptop than 2010. It's almost full proof if you also take the time to do an offline backup every now and then. I use the prodcut in a work environmennt where we backup and deploy various OS images to machines several times a week. It just works, it really does. However, we test and validate every image with an actual restore to the same machine before giving the image a stamp of approval to use for other deployments to similar hardware, or different hardware with Univeral Restore.
AT home, users should hopefully be validating their recoery by restoring it to a DIFFERENT disk and swapping it out with the original and making sure it boots. If it doesn't, then it's time to do some digging to find the problem. Could be a bad burn of the recovery media to disc or USB (especially if using 3rd party tools to burn the .iso to a USB). We've seen countless stories where it was the media - even a specific brand of DVD's that was the problem, but wasnt' identified for a long time, because the user kept using the same spindle of discs which all resulted in successful build notifications, but bad burns. Could be the bootable media was booted in the wrong mode (UEFI instead of Legacy or vice versa). Could be that the source or destination disk is going bad - sometimes you need to run chkdsk /f /r against the disk that the image will be restored to or run a diskpart /clean on it first.
These types of things don't just apply to Acronis - it should apply to any backup method and or backup software. If your OS and/or data are worth backing up, it should be worth testing those backups with an actual restore from time to time as well. That way, when things go south with the system or data in the real world, you know 100% that the image you already verified can be restored can be used again unless something catastrophic has happened to your hardware or the media that the image resides on.
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If I have understood you, what you are suggesting is that I make a new bootable DVD, using Acronis 2016 but on a different make of DVD, in order to try and validate the backups. Right?
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Robert, I'm suggesting you use your existing bootable media (if it's working) and restore an existing backup to a DIFFERENT hard drive than where the original data currently lives. If this is a file/folder recovery, you can restore it anywhere you'd like, but don't overwrite the existing version of it on your system during a recovery test (use a different external hard drive or something). If you have a full OS backup, remove the original drive and replace it with another backup or test drive. Then restore your OS backup to it and see if you can boot. If you can, cool. If not, then you swap back in the original drive and are working again, without damaging the original drive and then you can try to figure out why the backup and/or restore failed.
The idea is, do a realworld recovery, but don't do so to the original disk as you don't want to wipe that out for no reason in case something goes wrong.
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