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Are there issues with TI 2017 backups or did I just experience a fluke?

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Prior to upgrading my HP Pavilion laptop to the new Windows Creator's Edition (i.e. Windows 1703) I made sure that my copy of TI 2017 was up to date, cut a new restore CD, deleted a bunch of old files and applications, defragged my HD and took a full image backup of my system.  After the upgrade I was having a problem that I assumed was related to the upgrade (it wasn't) but I decided to restore my system and try the upgrade again.  Although I verify my backups during the backup process and had no errors, my restore simply failed after running for an extended period of time.  At that point my only solution was to restore the HD from an TI 2016 backup taken in December using my 2016 restore CD and  that restore was successfull.  Since there was not much on my laptop to worry about this was OK except for some files in one folder.  To get that folder back I was successful in mounting the TI 2017 backup that failed on the full restore and copied that folder back to my hard drive.  After I upgraded to the Windows Creator's Edition a second time and reinstalled or upgraded a few apps (including TI 2017) I again took another full backup and afterwards I did a seperate verify and everything is OK but I"m a bit freaked out that the pre-upgrade restore failed.  Was this just a fluke or are there problems with TI 2017?  Should I be doing something different during the restore so it wouldn't fail?  Please let me know.  Thanks.

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Hard to say William.  If you can pull data out of the backup, it is likely good.  However, why it failed to restore is the mystery, and where it failed as well. 

I just restored twice this week with 2017 NG 6116 WinPE rescue media and both were successful.  Both of these backups were with images taken after the creator's update had already been applied. I'm still finding "oddities" with the creator's update and that's what's lead me to restore a few times, but all has been fine for me so far.  

As for restoring...

1) I always use the offline rescue media and start from Windows - perhaps you did as well, but not sure.

2) When you boot the rescue media, make sure it boots the same way and the proper way for your OS install.  Chances are, you are booting it the same way each time, but maybe one time was booted legacy adn the other was UEFI?  Take a look at the differences with these screenshots.  You typically want to boot your rescue media the same way that your OS is installed to ensure a good restore as you can go legacy to legacy, uefi to uefi, sometimes from legacy to UEFI, but never from UEFI to legacy.... how you boot the rescue media, determines how the OS will be restored and the drive paritioned.

3) Depending on where the backup is stored, can also be an issue at times.  network shares or NAS devices can timeout across the network and cause an issue.  external usb drives can lose power if a hub is being used, or if the usb port is underpowered.  I have a usb 3.0 1TB WD and it has a micro usb 3.0 port - if i breathe on it, the micro connection on the drive loses connectivity for a second and that can cause a restore to fail.  Really hard to say what happened in your case.  If you have a spare drive to test with, you can try to restore that backup to another drive to see if just the restore process is successful, or if it won't even let you get to completion and then go from there if it does. Also good to have a spare drive to test with so you don't have to mess with your only working and/or original drive/data. 

Thanks for the reply.

I store my backups on an external HD connected via a USB cable and I always have booted from a rescue CD and I've had to do several restores over the last 2 years and Acronis has never failed me up to now.  Under normal circumstances the external HD is never connected to the laptop until I'm actually ready to perform a backup as this is my insurance policy against ransomeware.  I backed up again today now that the problem I thiought I was having with the upgrade (but wasn't ) has been resolved.

Just curious what oddities you're seeing with the upgrade?  My problem was that after the upgrade I could invoke Control Panel and the folder would open and I could see the applet icons but my system would clock for a number of seconds and then the control panel folder would close without warning.  After I restored with that earlier version of my system and ran the upgrade a second time I still had the problem so I dug deaper and found that I had an old .CPL file on my laptop that the Creator Edition no longer likes.  Turns out that this .CPL file was part of an audio driver that had never been updated since the laptop was new.  The bad thing was that HP had updated the driver a number of times but for some reason wasn't notifying users that a newer version was available.  The good news is that the current audio driver has been upgraded for Windows 10 and after downloading it, it fixed my Control Panel issue. 

 

There have been a few issues for me with the Creator's upgrade - but backup/restore still seems OK.  I've been holding off upgrading Acronis for a little bit, just to make sure though.

1) MalwareBytes took over as my AV program and Windows Defender turned off as a result.  I had to run a new MBAM cleanup tool and reinstall and that seemed to fix that, but it happened one other time since doing that so I had to do it again.

2) When I startup, CPU is high and even desktop icons take awhile to show up with the graphics at times.  I found others having the same issue with this and there was a specific item eating up CPU, but I can't remember it now.  The fix though was to disable  system >>> notifications and preferences >>> and turn off the notifications from apps and other senders as well as turning off tips and tricks and the Windows Welcome experience.

3) I just noticed that I don't see the Acronis backup icon in the taskbar tray when a backup is running - I'll keep an eye on that when I upgrade Acronis this week to see if that helps, or not. 

4) A few of my other apps had to be re-registered again as the change in paritions caused the hard drive to be "different" via UUID.

5) Because of #4, I had to re-pick backup and destination in a number of my backup products again.  The cause for this was that Windows created a new recovery partition at the end of my OS disk and left the old one where it was - looks like this was because it needed to make a larger recovery drive.  I ended up using minitool parition to delete the old recovery parition and reclaim the space back again. 

I never looked but I'm wondering if the TI 2017 software was aware that there was going to be a new recovery partion built with the Creator's edition and when I tried to use a 2017 restore CD made prior to the Creator's Update to restore over the top of the Creator's edition it failed as it would not overwrite that new partition.  The backup that I did use to restore my laptop was a 2016 backup wiht a 2016 restore CD so perhaps the 2016 software simply didn't care about that new partition and overwrote it.  Since my backup is now a Post-Creator's edition backup and Acronis made yet another update to the software, perhaps everything is now in sync.

I don't think so.  This was the first time I ended up with a new recovery partition and it looks like only because it made itself bigger than the old one - first time it's happened to me in all of my upgrades, but have heard of it happenign to others too.  If you do a fresh build , it puts it where it's always been, but whatever extras MS stuffed into it, just didn't seem to fit in the old parition.  

Yeah, you can't do a 1 for 1 recovery via parition if the old partition is smaller than the new one.  You'd either have to use something like minitool parition wizard to increase the size on the disk first, or you'd have to do a full disk recovery.  

I basically ended up just blowing away the old recovery parition that was left behind and using minitool to give the space back to C and left the new recovery partition at the end of the drive.

Hopefully you're in good shape now with the new update!

Hello William,

A small tip for easier Windows backup and restoration: when defining backup source, include disks entirely, without excluding partitions from selection. That gives 2 advantages:

1) all new partitions on the selected disk will be included automatically into the backup

2) restoration wizard has less steps and is simple to follow. You have to define just the recovery destination disk, without going through each partition recovery setting. There are nice illustrations of this in the disk recovery tutorial by Steve Smith, Acronis MVP.

Regards,

Slava