Multiple problems, looking for advice
I bought True Image 2020 with 5 GB cloud storage, 3 machines. I am backing up my system and my wife's. Mine has about 1 TB and hers, about 200 GB. I installed the program on both machines and set up backups. The following is a synopsis as I have going back and forth with I presume the lowest level of tech support for a couple of months now. Mine started but my wife's did not. It wouldn't even show up online, despite her machine being logged in properly. From her machine I could go online through the program and see the backup of my machine. From mine, I could see her machine so clicked on the make backup now button. HUGE MISTAKE. No warning, nothing saying to never, ever do this. What it did was to merge her backup into my file structure. There would be no easy way to separate the files! Anyhow, after some advice to delete her backups entirely I decided rather than take a chance of file loss I would make a new backup from her machine first. This seemed to work, it showed up online. Then I deleted her old, merged backup. The cloud software removed her files, leaving my backup alright. So now things looked pretty good, each cloud backup seemed to be correct. Her machine showed mine as "other" and vice versa. But, every day I got a popup warning saying that the password entered for her machine was wrong. How could this be? From her machine I could see all the files and there were no error messages so clearly this message on my machine was wrong. So I contacted tech support. Long story short I was advised to run some internal reports and upload the files. After about a week I was told that the problem was a disk error on my machine. Um, ok, so I asked, could you be more specific? I was told to run chkdsk and email them a screenshot of the result. No errors found. Then I was told to contact my computer tech support as the problem was deeper, and to run some program called SFC, which I did. It reported some corrupted files related to Windows Defender. I sent them the log file. So I went to see if anything changed, and boy did it! Now all three backups are clearly wrong, my wife's computer shows two copies of her backup and mine all as for her machine, and my machine shows the two copies of my wife's backup as other and mine as my computer. Online it is not possible to browse the files as it hangs at "Loading..." Well, at least for the past 20 minutes after selecting one machine, so I consider that hung up. Anyhow, my question. Is this software really that screwed up? I'm not trying to do anything unusual here: buy software, install, and do the simplest of actions. Yes it seems completely, utterly messed up! Has anyone here ever had success going through tech support and getting a solution that works? Does anyone have any advice for me, besides throwing out all our computers and never touching one again? Because after months of this and literally dozens of hours working on it I am totally frustrated with this situation.
Peter, putting everything in one paragraph makes analysis of what is going on more difficult. While I understand one issue, the merging of the backups on two PCs, I am still unclear on the status of the initial problem. Or it could just be that I was unable to distill what was going on.
Ian
Peter, my first question would be, do you have all the original data, locally on both of your computers?
My second question would be, are both computers named differently (unique names)?
If so... personally, I would bite the bullet and make new backups of each and stop the existing Cloud backup for each as well. Sometimes it is far less time consuming and less frustrating to cut the loss of an initial PC issue and start fresh, than it is to resolve it. Working in IT, if a problem looks like it may take more than a couple of hours to resolve, we will often rebuild the OS instead of trying to hunt down the problem - it ends up being faster and more reliable in the long run. In this situation, I think that might be the case too. This is assuming you still have the original data and it's not entirely tied up in your only Cloud backup that appears to have gone south.
If you do start over, make each NEW backup and be sure to use a NEW and unique name for each backup too. Then run the first PC backup to the Cloud (yours I suppose, or your wife's - whatever you want to do first). And check it in the Cloud to make sure it's all good.
Then, do the second PC backup to the Cloud. And check in the Cloud to make sure it's all good.
Last, but not least... please also consider taking local backups (to another external drive or NAS device, or even a dedicated external device for each computer).
IMHO, Cloud is not good for the primary and/or only backup of critical data - and I mean all Cloud backup options, not directly related to this product. Local backups are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH, MUCH faster to create backups and to restore. A local backup would be your 1st line of defense and save you oodles of time for backups and recovery.
That said, no backup is 100% guaranteed because hardware fails, disasters occur, accidents happen, software is compromised, unexpected power outages occur, data gets corrupted, malware strikes, fire destroys everything or theft leaves you with nothing.
That's where your secondary, or even your third option to the Cloud (as an offsite and redundant backup) comes into play. At a minimum, a good backup plan, especially when critical or important data is involved, should follow the rule of 3-2-1.
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As for all of the other questions... 1st line tech support is usually scripted in a lot of these products. You'll find some great techs, but you'll also find some duds. There are a strong group of forum posters here that will try to help you out too though. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Cloud, we don't have any access or insight as to how the Cloud backups are handled so we can't pinpoint issues that might be occurring on the Cloud servers, or in the code that makes it all happen in the background. You would likely need an escalated ticket and an advanced Acronis technician assigned to the case - which you may want to consider if you want to stay on the path of trying to figure out what happened, or at least trying to resolve things so they are correct again if you stick with the existing backup(s).
I don't know how the backups got crossed into each other here - this sounds a bit scary. Can' say I remember this happening to anyone else in the forums, up to this point though. I don't buy that having a corrupted disk caused the backups from 2 different computers to merge into one into the Cloud. SFC /Scannow is a local Windows command to repair faults in the local Operating System. I actually run it fairly often just to check the health of my OS, but it should not cause 2 different cloud backups from 2 different computers to cross wires in the Cloud - the backup identifiers for each computer and each backup task should be completely unique to each other! So,
@Bobbo_3C0X1, definitely not anything to do with corrupted disk. It happened to me last week and it was due to confusion on my part. It should not be possible for this to happen.
Good point about names of the PCs involved. I always identify the PC in the task name but even that did not prevent me for erroneously merging backups of two different PCs.
Ian
I went through at least half a dozen first-line techs and the problem was escalated and nothing did any good.
My solution was to get completely different licenses for each computer. Of course this was much more expensive than it should have been but I was traveling a lot and didn't have the time to keep messing with it and dealing with the very time consuming Acronis tech support and their suggestions, none of which worked. I don't believe they ever actually understood the problem I was having.
I have figured out something about it. Initially, I set up my machine to back up both my and my wife's machine. This initially looked like it was working, but I found that I could not access many of her directories via their cloud system. Apparently, I did something the program didn't like in there and everything got intermixed.
I then deleted everything in the cloud and started again, but couldn't get her machine to back up. So then I reinstalled Acronis on her machine and set it locally to back up to the cloud.
But now both machines were linked permanently and everything was scrambled together in the directories. A full backup would be impossible to either machine.
I then completely deleted Acronis from her machine, got a new license for 1 machine, installed on her machine, and it ran properly and backed up everything.
But on my machine, it kept giving me error notifications that the backup was not occurring on her machine, although mine seemed alright. So I checked, and there was no backup scheduled on my machine for her machine.
So I completely removed Acronis on my machine and reinstalled, starting from scratch. But it is still giving me daily notifications that the backup of her machine failed. Yet on her machine it keeps reporting success, and the files seem ok in the cloud.
So I'm thinking that there is some hidden config file or registry entry that is corrupted in my machine which is causing the problem.
But, I don't have time to figure it all out in a product which should just work so am hoping for the best.
Yes I have local backups but not automatic so if something bad happened some stuff would get lost if Acronis isn't actually backing up properly.
My wife's computer was attacked by a form of ransomware but between the AV software and her turning it off pretty quickly I was able to attach the disk to another machine and retrieve 99% of the files and now we have much better AV/AR software which I tested with a script and believe gives decent protection. And if Acronis works via the cloud, we're completely protected, although restoration would be a very large job.
Years ago the backup software seemed far better. Admin access to a machine and everything was done over the network. Restoration was a simple task of reformatting the disk, then running a single script.
That's what I want now. Without all these poorly documented processes and lack of easy backup verification.