2 bad backups?
Hi all.
This might be a long post so apologies in advance.
I have had acronis since about 2009 and it has worked well most of the time. Now however I am having a really tough time with it.
I Have 2 Full one time backups which were made with true home 2011. They are stored on seperate internal hard drives. I maneged to get the uKash police scam virus a couple of days ago and it disabled all my anti virus and malware protection and also encrypted lots of my files. Even reinstalling anti virus software was no good, the live protection service simply will not work.
The corrupted/encrypted files are mostly documents and pictures or media files. After trying everything I decided to go with the full restore option. Loaded up acronis and there were my 2 backups. One is only a month old and the other is about 8 months old. Unfortunately none of them will work. I get a variety of errors including these which may not be the exact wording but you'll get the idea
This is not the last volume of the backup
Cant find the backup ( even when I browse to it and try to run it)
If I try and explore the backup it says it's corrupt.
There are others but it pretty much all adds up to the same thing, I cant restore either of the backups. I have tried running acronis from windows and from a recovery disc and its the same.
Does this virus corrupt acronis backup files? if so then whats the point of backing up to protect against viruses/malware if the malware can ruin your backups.
Is there anything I can do?
I don't want to lose years of pictures and documants etc due to this stupid malware. Sorry if it's becoming a rant here but I am really annoyed this has happened.
One long shot that may or may not work but it is worth trying.
Sign up for the 2013 trial version. No downloads necessary.
Register the trial version serial which is provided via email.
From within your own Acronis personal account, download the bootable iso file.
Burn the downloaded iso file onto a new CD.
Reboot using the new CD and see if the 2013 trial bootable CD offers any better results. if the most current backup fails, then try the oldest one.
Before throwing in the towel would be to try Acronis Support.
They provide free assistance when recovery is an issue.
Thanks guys. Yeah it's a heck of a virus. I have had a few variants of it before and although they have disabled the system I have always been able to remove them easily in safe mode with no damage to anything else.
The backups dont verify or let me do anything with any version of acronis. I can only imagine the virus corrupted them too even though it was only on the system for a few minutes maximum. Its just poor luck i think. 2 backups on 2 seperate drives and they have both been found and ruined.
I have luckily not lost a great deal of files that can't be replaced so I think I will just do a format of drive c and delete the corrupt files from my other drives while leaving the healthy ones in place.
Any advice on a sure fire way to clean my C drive completely so the virus doesn't pop up on my new installation? Bear in mind I wont be in windows while cleaning the drive so needs to be something I can boot up. Would the acronis drive cleaner thingy be ok?