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Remove Acronis Network Drive from my system?

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I have discovered that Acronis maps a network drive to my E: drive. This blocks my USB ports and an external DVD drive. How can I eliminate it from my system? Screen caps of the offending Acronis drive info are attached. Thanks!

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Acronis Drive Properties.jpg 36.19 KB
Acronis network drive.jpg 72.81 KB
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David, this is a known behaviour that Acronis does not provide any user control over!  By default Acronis Drive will normally be assigned to drive letter M: so it is unusual to read that it is assigned to drive E: on your system.

If you open an Administrator terminal window and type in subst it will show you the path to where this assignment is made, where you would have the option to delete the subst assignment (see below).

PowerShell 5 awaiting your commands.
RemoteSigned
Loading personal and system profiles took 635ms.
PS D:\powershell> subst
M:\: => C:\Users\smiths\AppData\Local\Acronis\Acronis Drive
PS D:\powershell> subst /?
Associates a path with a drive letter.

SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1: /D

  drive1:        Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
  [drive2:]path  Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
                 a virtual drive.
  /D             Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.

Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.
PS D:\powershell>

Thank you, Steve! I guess I have stumbled into the tar pit of Acronis. I added a hard drive to save a lot of video and photos and used M: for Media (who would ever do that?). That has somehow shifted the uncontrollable Acronis drive to my E: drive, which happens to be my USB and memory card path - normally unpopulated, so it appears "open" to any unsophisticated programs.

Unfortunately, I can't see anything using the subst command, so I can't delete the E: path that now is messing up my USB and memory card transfers.

Do you have any other suggestions for this disaster?

Thanks again --

David, the obvious though not necessarily personal choice for you would be to assign your Media drive to another drive letter so as to leave M: vacant for Acronis Drive to take which should release your E: drive back for your USB and memory card path.

Note: if releasing M: then you will probably need to do a restart of Windows to get Acronis Drive to move from using E: and if that doesn't reset the drive letter, then do a Repair install of Acronis.  See KB 60915: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office, Acronis True Image: repairing program settings - for more information.

David, check out this KB article...

https://kb.acronis.com/content/59584

It's written for ATI 2017 but it may work. If you don't need Acronis Drive, you should be able to get rid of it completely as I've done. Can't recall how, but I think it just involved getting rid of folders.

My folder C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\AcronisDrive is empty.

 

 

Thank you, Steve and BrunoC, for your suggestions. I wanted to wait until after my backup completes this morning before I start messing around with TIH2020, so I'll let you know later in the week what happened.

It would be nice if Acronis would admit they actually do take over a drive letter (my initial email complaint to them about CPHO was met with a total denial of a hidden Acronis drive on my system), and it would be even better if they let the user easily move it to an unused drive letter (when necessary), instead of just guessing what the system's hardware configuration is and then jamming it in.

I'm pretty sure the install of the new CPHO left something that kept the messed up drive configuration when I uninstalled it and reinstalled TIH2020, because I never had the problems before.

I finally figured out how to do this without hacking or changing drive letters! I backed up my TIH2020 settings, uninstalled TIH2020, and removed all Acronis items in the registry using RegEdit (may not have to touch the registry now, but at the time it made sense to get everything off to start fresh). I restarted my computer and then fully populated every possible empty drive - USB, memory card, optical - with something (flash drive, memory card, DVD) so they all showed up in the File Explorer. I reinstalled TIH2020 and restored my settings and it moved the Acronis virtual drive to K:. Of course, because I can't escape the Acronis tar pit that easily, I had long ago set my external backup letter to K: and that meant that TIH2020 couldn't see the backup drive it was supposed to use.  I redid it all, this time including my K: drive on one of the USB ports and leaving off one of the USB drives. A check of the Acronis settings.xml file showed that it put the virtual drive on J:. When I restored my TIH2020 settings everything was back. The settings don't save the virtual drive letter, so the new installation uses the new virtual drive letter with all of my old settings.

I can see and use all of my removable drives now and I won't have to remember how to hack Acronis or deal with drive letter issues again in the future (unless I manage to max everything out and/or hit the J: drive bump).

Thanks for all your help - I hope this helps someone in the future! I think this will solve the virtual disk drive problem I faced with Acronis CPHO, too. Maybe I'll try it next year...

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David Stroup wrote:

I finally figured out how to do this without hacking or changing drive letters! I backed up my TIH2020 settings, uninstalled TIH2020, and removed all Acronis items in the registry using RegEdit (may not have to touch the registry now, but at the time it made sense to get everything off to start fresh). I restarted my computer and then fully populated every possible empty drive - USB, memory card, optical - with something (flash drive, memory card, DVD) so they all showed up in the File Explorer. I reinstalled TIH2020 and restored my settings and it moved the Acronis virtual drive to K:. Of course, because I can't escape the Acronis tar pit that easily, I had long ago set my external backup letter to K: and that meant that TIH2020 couldn't see the backup drive it was supposed to use.  I redid it all, this time including my K: drive on one of the USB ports and leaving off one of the USB drives. A check of the Acronis settings.xml file showed that it put the virtual drive on J:. When I restored my TIH2020 settings everything was back. The settings don't save the virtual drive letter, so the new installation uses the new virtual drive letter with all of my old settings.

I can see and use all of my removable drives now and I won't have to remember how to hack Acronis or deal with drive letter issues again in the future (unless I manage to max everything out and/or hit the J: drive bump).

Thanks for all your help - I hope this helps someone in the future! I think this will solve the virtual disk drive problem I faced with Acronis CPHO, too. Maybe I'll try it next year...

Hello David.

Thanks for sharing what helped you to workaround the issue.

Feel free to participate in the community anytime!

Best regards.