Questions about clean reinstall
After fighting an ATI/FTP/WD MyCloud problem off and on for months it finally occurred to me that I haven't tried a clean reinstallation of ATI. And Bobbo_3C0X1 has provided excellent and detailed instructions for doing this at https://forum.acronis.com/forum/125695 (and probably other places). But I loose a lot by doing a truly clean install. Even if I take a copy of the database and rebuild it, there are things like logs that I think are not in the database. (There are also multiple databases - C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Database and C:\ProgramData\Acronis\Home\Database - with current timestamps so I don't know how many to copy and rebuild.) So if the clean install doesn't fix the FTP problem I would like to get back to where I am now. I obviously could take a backup and do a full system restore but (I hope) that is overkill.
Can I make a copy of the Acronis AppData and ProgData directories and copy them back if the clean install doesn't fix things? (I assume I would have to go through all the "stop Acronis services" before both the saving and copying back.)
Good question - you may have to be the guinea pig on this one as I have not tried - take that backup just in case.
Ok. In a day or two this guinea pig will get up the nerve to try it.
The problem with restoring the entire folder and all contents is what if that's where the original issue occured to begin with (say a corrupt file or reference pointer somewhere in the folder). If that was the case, then you'd just be bringing the same issue back in by copying it back.
I thought of that. I'll try the currently failing FTP backup before restoring anything. If the FTP still fails I won't loose anyting (that I know of) by restoring al of the Acronis AppData and ProgData. But if the FTP problem is fixed then I may be in for a lot of trial and error restorinig and rerestoring.
Good luck and let us know how it goes :)
For the FTP problem, is this with restores across FTP? If so, could you just copy the backup through an FTP client so it's local again and restore from that as a possible work-a-round?
For the FTP problem, is this with restores across FTP?
No. I'm perfectly willing to let the recovery tool to access the .tib files on my NAS drive via SMB for a restore. I just don't want Windows to to have SMB access it. FTP is the only (Acrobis-available) alternative to SMB that I know of.
If so, could you just copy the backup through an FTP client so it's local again and restore from that as a possible work-a-round?
There are circumventions galore! The easiest I can think of is back up to a local (USB-attached external) drive and then FTP the .tib file (outside of Acronis) to my "secure" server. The only problem is knowing what file to FTP. If I had a really clever script I could probably extract the name from a log file, but I don't have that clever script yet.
Uh, I have majorly shot myself in the foot. Either I had a major disk failure at the same time I ran the Cleanup tool or it deleted not just Acronis TI from my computer but all my .tib files. I really didn't want that to happen! (It may have been a disk failure because some non-Acronis backups seem to have gone, too - several years of archived work files. But it doesn't look like a disk failure.) Too bad I wan't yet taking FTP backups of my backups. <sigh>
Is there a log created by the Cleanup too showing everything it did?
Update: The copy I took of Acronis AppData and ProgData is also gone! I had them in a directory names "Acronis recovery stuff" on the same USB-attached external drive as my .tib files. Does the cleanup tool delete everything with "Acronis" in the name? The "Acronis recovery stuff" directory want deleted, but that is probably because the cleanup ustility was runing from there. And that's all that's in that directory now.
Anyone know of good data recovery tools that recover dleted files?
Patrick, I have used the cleanup tools a number of times and it has never touched any of my .tib files and I would never expect it to do so!
I am not aware of any log being created by the cleanup tool - I would recommend sending a PM to one of the Acronis Support engineers about this question - try either Ekaterina or Slava. The actions of the cleanup tool should only touch the files & folders created by either ATIH or Acronis Disk Director on your main OS partition. Where were your .tib files stored?
Patrick, give Piriform's Recuva program to look for your deleted files.
The .tib files were on a USB-attached external drive - my F drive. Definitely not my main partition.
I was wrong about the recovery copies of the AppData and ProgData files. I did that to myself. I copied them; then remebered I had not first terminated the Acronis services so I deleted the copied dfirectories. After terminating the services I think I forgot to recopy them. That doesn't explain the missing .tib files, though. I'll PM one of the engineers.
Patrick, give Piriform's Recuva program to look for your deleted files.
I tried it and it found several thousand deleted files. Unfortunately, it doesn't recover the directory structure (even though it reports the data structure that the original deleted file was in). Maybe the directory structure would have been restored if I recovered "in place", but I recovered to another drive.
It did find my deleted .tib files and my non-Acronis archival files. It also found the Acrons AppData and ProgData files that I had purposefully deleted, but I doubt I can safely rebuild the directory structure there.
I'm going to try a couple other recovery tools and see if they do any better.
Thanks for the update Patrick, I wish you luck with the recovery tools you try.
Patrick,
Recuva is OK for simple file deletion but has not been very successful for me at home or work unless the conditions are optimal where a file is deleted and recuva is immediately run before anything else happens on the disk. However, we've had really good luck with Active File Recovery. It's $60, but a lot cheaper than a service like Drive Savers and well worth the price if it saves your valuable data.
http://www.file-recovery.com/download.htm
I'd be super suprised (and afraid) if the cleanup tool took any backups with it - have never heard of that happening and should not target any .tib files - it basically searches the registry and install folders to make sure the files put there during installation are fully deleted.
I use UFS Explorer Standard Recovery which supports a wide range of file systems. I think it is about 40 Euro, but it is a long time since I last checked.
The success of any file recovery activity is largely depenent on immediately taking steps to ensure that nothing is written to the relevant HDD.
I too doubt that the clean-up utility would have deleted backup files (*.tib).
Ian
I downloaded the demo version of Active File Recovery, liked what I saw, and am currently downloading the Ultimate version.
Looking at timestamps of files I want to recover, I can't guarantee my backup folders (and other folders) were there today, but there are only 4 items in the directory now and there were 8 or 9 before deletion. I'm pretty sure I would have notices if they had been gone when I created. I guess I could have accidentally deleted them this morning, but I can't imagine my not noticing that.
Anyway, I will hopefully have important things recovered by tomorrow. And I think I will start taking backups of my backup files.
Very odd. In the recovered .tib files every "full" file has 0 bytes. Many if the "inc" files have data. Those are files recovered by Active File Recovery. Recuva didn't recover the "full" files at all. I think that means I don't have any backups any more. That's really the only important data that I've lost but it's kind of significant. I guess I start over with Acronis now.
Patrick, this is not good news. Looking at what Active File Recovery claims it can do it is dobutful that other software will do any better.
I had a less severe issue about two weeks ago. Did something silly (synced files the wrong way - to two backup location) and my off-site backup was week old and did not have two important files which I had to recreate. The cloud backup (last backup the day before) had lost its settings in a software reinstallation and I did not properly reconfigure it, so my data partion was no longer included.
Ian
Patrick - so sorry to hear that. That is a real bummer. Any chance you have system protection turned on that disk? If so, you might be able to recover with it . Problem is that Windows only turns it on the OS paritition by default, so chances are it isn't active, or not active for your backup disks - worth checking out though, just to be sure. Did you try the demo of Active File Recovery as well - just to see?
If nothing else, this is a (tough) learning experience, but hopefully one that others can learn from as well. Backups are great, but only as long as they are not lost, damaged or deleted too! The golden rule of 3-2-1 is an I.T. best (minimum really) practice for backups and something we should all strive to achieve at home. 3 copies of your data (the original and at least 2 backups)... 2 backup locations at a minium (for instance a NAS and a USB external drive)... and 1 backup (at least) stored offsite.
Personally, even though I could probably live without most of my data, I like to be able to restore my OS and make sure things like my family pictures are safely backed up. Acronis is my go-to backup software, but it's not my only one as I like to diversify not just the backup schemes, frequency and locations, but also the backup optoins as well.
I also have multiple backups with both products. 1 local to a different internal drive, 1 to a NAS, 1 to Acronis Cloud and 1 as an occassional offline backup to another external USB 3.0 hard drive that only connects for the purpose of offline backup and recovery. I vary the frequency and days of the backups so that fulls are spread out a bit and use one diff and one incremetnal scheme. I configure the other backup product to do the opposite schedule with opposite schemes to give me all sorts of options to choose from each day. I've never had to use the other backup product to recover as Acronis does this just fine, but I do use it from time to time to ensure that both are tested.
Paranoid? Perhaps. But I feel very confident in my ability to recover in just about any situation.
Yup. Sort of a bummer. Yes, I tried the demo version of Active Data Recovery and liked what I saw enough to buy the product. (I even splurged and got the Ultimate version in case I ever need a stand-alone bootable version.) And with it I was able to recover the non-Acronis archives I have. But when it recovered the empty "full" .tib files I decided my backups were toast. But the lost Actonis data files were just backups, not the original partitions, folders, and files. I wasn't the end of the world.
I do have (slightly out of date) additional Acronis backups on a different disk. I've sort of got a 3-2-0 scheme for most of my data and OS system drives. But that "most" bit me. I did not do a good job or backing up data on my "backup" drive. It's now being fixed a bit - everything will be at least 2-2-0 (when the backup completes). I've been reluctant to go the cloud route, but maybe I'd better start considering that.
I, too, am probably paranioid, but I'm trying to have solutions for a number of failure scenariois. (And I expect nobody is particularly interested in what I'm trying to do, but it helps me put in in writing.)
- Recover from a failed disk drive. (And I have multiple drives.)
- Recover from a corrupted operating system.
- Recover corrupted files. (Where "corrupted" usually means self inflicted erasure or modification.)
- Recover from a ransomware attack.
- Recover ideas (rather than data) by referencing copies of old data.
ATI does a very good job a very good job of the first 3.
#4 is trickier, but ATI allows FTP access to a secure server, and those FTPed files are not accessable by any ransomware that I know of. I have found no other backup software that has that FTP support.
#5 is a fuzzy thing that no software can handle. I have to decide what historical data to keep. And that was the non-Acronis archival data that I lost from my backup drive. Yeah Active Data Recovery!