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Upgrading from 2012 and backwards compatibility

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Hi all,

I looked into upgrading from windows 7 to 10 today but apparently Acronis 2012 is not compatible.

If I upgrade, will I be able to continue/import/update my current configured backups? I have a large ongoing incremental backup that I also upload to the cloud and starting it again would be rather annoying.

I'm also interested to know if 2016 functions better than 2012 - I've had a lot of problems over the years with various versions of Acronis not behaving nicely over network shares with large backups (eg verify fails every so often but if you repeat it it passes), and general backup management (filenames are inconsistent, etc).

It seems to me that the core functionality has been neglected at the expense of adding bells and whistles a lot over the years. I was wondering if with 2016 things have improved.

Thanks in advance!

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Hello Mark, you may want to tak a look at https://kb.acronis.com/content/1689 which gives a detailed list of compatibility for different Acronis products and which previous versions they are compatible with.  For ATIH 2016 the list only

goes back to 2013 which may be a problem with your 2012 backups.

As you are aware, ATIH 2012 is not compatible to run within Windows 10 however, it should be fine to be used in an offline mode, i.e. booted from rescue media if this works already for you, though you would need to test that you have network connectivity if you want to access Cloud backups.

In terms of ATIH 2016 functionality, I would suggest having a read through the forums as there are mixed views on that, i.e. some users are happy with the 2016 functionality whereas others are disappointed in the 'dumbing' down of the GUI, removal of easy access to logs, removal of some features such as local sync etc.  See https://kb.acronis.com/content/48662 which lists features discontinued in ATIH 2015 that also apply to 2016.

My personal experience has been OK with running 2016 on Windows 10 on multiple systems but I do not use Cloud and have my own Synology NAS which I backup to without creating any network shares.  Others will report very different experiences as shown in the forums.

Acronis are looking to put out an update for 2016 sometime soon, April has been mentioned, which is aimed at fixing some of the issues raised for this version, including fixing a problem that affects shutdown.

Hi Steve, thanks for the quick reply.

Disappointing that 2012 backups seem to be incompatible.

As for the missing featuers of 2016 the only one of note to me is consolidation, but the way it worked was so awful and broken anyway that it was essentially useless for large backups (you needed basically twice the space of the backup to consolidate, which sort of defeated the purpose for large backups on disks which were running low on space).

Sounds like 2016 has the usual suite of issues too. It's a bit sad all round. I've been using Acronis for something like 10 years across various paid versions. I think this might be the final nail in the coffin. It's just caused too many headaches over the years, and all I really want is a *reliable* backup solution without bells and whistles. Each time a new version comes out, instead of fixing existing problems, it has a bunch of new ones.

Anyway I'll see if anyone else has suggestions, otherwise it might be time to look at alternative software before I upgrade to Windows 10 (something I'm in no partiuclar hurry to do).

Cheers!