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I am at a Tipping Point

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I have been an Acronis user since 2016, and have complex schedules backing up my main production machine's hard disk and critical folders to several NAS drives.  The full measure of backup software is in recovery mode when you need to restore files.  In this instance, Acronis 2020 has, unfortunately, let me down.  

I had a disk crash, necessitating rebuilding from scratch my entire application suite.  I installed Acronis 2020,  but it could not see existing backup images on my NAS drive BECAUSE THERE WAS NO CORRESPONDING BACKUP SCHEME SET UP IN ACRONIS? What is the use of that?  Acronis images should be readable wherever they exist on your system or network-attached drives. 

But, all was not lost, I built a USB memory stick as a boot device with the Acronis recovery software, rebooted and the app started. That is about the only thing that went right.  

I could see local hard disks, USB attached RAID array but not any of my NAS drives containing the Acronis backups.  I had to reboot into Windows and use File Explorer to copy the Acronis, rebooted onto the USB drive, found the image files, and started a restore.   Everything proceeded normally until the process began restoring until it arrived at my most critical folder, My Pictures, where the images are that I am currently working on.  I am a Photographer, so this is kind of critical.  

The restore process started throwing out errors file by file, to the point where I had to terminate the process.  Looking at the successfully restored My Documents folder, everything restored had a unique filer termination attached of 8 digits and letters, Letter to Client.DOCX-CBU16ts8 (an MS Word file), requiring me to painstakingly rename each file manually in File Explorer before I could use them again.  I luckily, as part of my 3 tier backup system, had everything I needed in Dropbox, which was a quick click and drag, not requiring to boot into a Windows runtime environment. 

Why?  Even this morning after several backups to NAS devices have been run, when selecting Recovery, Acronis cannot see any NAS drives in the system tree, even though it has just completed a backup to a NAS destination.  

What is the use of an imaging program if it will not successfully restore files in a situation where the user needs them the most?  

I am at the point where I am reconsidering the application as either usable or a waste of time. 

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Robert,

Wow, what a horror story!

You said:

I had a disk crash, necessitating rebuilding from scratch my entire application suite.  I installed Acronis 2020,  but it could not see existing backup images on my NAS drive BECAUSE THERE WAS NO CORRESPONDING BACKUP SCHEME SET UP IN ACRONIS? What is the use of that? 

It is required that after you install or re-install the application and your backup files are located on a network device that you use the Add existing backup option to bring those backups and the associated backup task back into the app GUI.

From the user guide:

  • If you have backups that are not shown in the list, you can add them manually.To add backups manually: 
  • 1. In the Backup section, at the bottom of the backup list, click the arrow icon, and then click Add existing backup. The program opens a window where you can browse for backups on your computer. 
  • 2. Select a backup version (a .tib file), and then click Add.The entire backup will be added to the list.

You said:

Acronis images should be readable wherever they exist on your system or network-attached drives. 

 

The files are readable but in the case of files stored on a network location, that location must be configured via the above method to do so.

You said:

I could see local hard disks, USB attached RAID array but not any of my NAS drives containing the Acronis backups. 

It is not intuitive to locate network locations with the PE environment boot media I will admit.  However this can be done by selecting Recover then, Browse, then in the path field typing in the path to your network location.  This can be done using the following format \\devicename\sharename or \\IPaddress\sharename.

  You said:

Everything proceeded normally until the process began restoring until it arrived at my most critical folder, My Pictures, where the images are that I am currently working on.  I am a Photographer, so this is kind of critical.  

The restore process started throwing out errors file by file, to the point where I had to terminate the process.  Looking at the successfully restored My Documents folder, everything restored had a unique filer termination attached of 8 digits and letters, Letter to Client.DOCX-CBU16ts8 (an MS Word file), requiring me to painstakingly rename each file manually in File Explorer before I could use them again. 

Are your pictures located in some other location rather than on your NAS?  I have never seen anyone post such an issue with the product.  Your 2_0.PNG shows that the content is located on a Dropbox folder which is not on your local network.  I am surprised that the application was even able to retrieve these files if they are stored on Dropbox  as the app is not designed to do that.  I can understand your idea behind doing this but the application again does not anticipate this and expects files to be located physically on the local network when using network drives.  I believe this is at root of the file renaming issue and therefore is quite frankly, expected behavior.

You said:

Why?  Even this morning after several backups to NAS devices have been run, when selecting Recovery, Acronis cannot see any NAS drives in the system tree, even though it has just completed a backup to a NAS destination. 

In your 1_0.PNG it appears that the application has problems resolving your network drive locations as evidenced by the ! marks by two of the backups and the fact that all of your tasks show backup locations as IP address locations.  Are you using the netuse command to access these drives?  Are these network drives persistent in Windows File Explorer?  You have some issue there and if you can get that fixed then this issue you have will not exist.