Acronis Windows 7 x64 Issues

Acronis team, can I please get some help with this issue. I am without backups as a result of the product issues.

Did you try reinstalling TI?

Are any other disk imaging programs installed?

Are any other Acronis programs installed?

Are any media reader drives or other media-type drives connected (iPod, printer with media slots, etc.)? You could try disconnecting them or disabling them and see if it's better.

It would probably be a good idea to create the Acronis System Report from TI and submit a formal support request.

Hi Mudcrab, no other imaging software until I had to stop using TI. No USB devices beyond keyboard and mouse. All my attempts to contact support require me to pay for the service, which I do not intend to do.

Sorry, forgot to answer two questions. I had Disk Director and TI. Removed DD, issues persisted. Uninstalled; reboot; install TI; many times; no luck.

What build of TI are you using?

Have you tried using the Clean Up Utility?

Which version of DD was it?

I upgraded to the latest 2011 for both to get Windows 7 compatibility, so I thought. Not sure why the cleanup utility is needed, I have no issues uninstalling the product.

Someone in another forum analyzed the BSOD dumps. As I thought, 2011 does not play well with Windows 7 64. Time to look for other options.

Did you ever get the feeling we are paying Acronis to do their Beta testing with TIH 2011 on Win7 x64?
I have had numerous incidences of 2011 not responding especially when non-stop backup was involved, "feature" should be called "Non-Stop Not Responding"

Hello all,

Thank you very much for your comments, your valuable feedback and kind assistance!

ismatd,

I will do my best to assist you.

Unfortunately I do not have any diagnostic information from your computer, but it is possible that this BSOD is caused by the Driver Verifier is which blocking the snapman.sys driver. Please check this Microsoft KB article for a solution.

If you have additional questions or any other issues, please let me know.

Thank you.

fwiw I use ATI Home 2010 without issues with windows 7 64 bit.

Hi Anton, I could not stop the system performance randomly degrading; Windows Search crashing every few minutes, eventually reinstalled Windows without Acronis. Now everything is running really well. I do not care to experiement on Acronis's behalf. I am evaluating an alternative that is hand down beating Acronis; compression ratios are almost equal; UI is clean and simple; everything about it makes Acronis look over engneered. If Acronis does not have a fix within 10 days, I will be moving over to the alternative.

Attached is the mini-dump others have evaluated pointing to Acronis as the culprit.

mini dump attached

Anton, you have the data, any news from the assistance you offered?

Hello ismatd,

Thank you for replying and I am very sorry for not replying earlier.

After analyzing the dump file it appears that Microsoft driver verifier is blocking Acronis drivers. We have also recently released a Knowledge Base article which has the same Microsoft KB article that I suggested in my post above.

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

Anton, other products do not have this issue, I have tested many whilst waiting for Acronis. I am switching vendors. Acronis should not rely on customers disabling features and functions of an OS to allow its products to operate.

Just for the record, I have been an Acronis customer for many years and their products have been excellent, however, I too have very serious issues with the later releases, in particular TI 2010 and now TI 2011, on my Windows 7 64bit system. I have the TI set to do a "system" drive backup to a network drive once a day only at system startup.

Ever since I did this, I have been experiencing BSOD randomly during the backup operation. The BSOD incidents are so severe that no trace is left, no dump file (and I have the registry set to capture dumps).

I have followed the various threads on this forum on various issues and have now come to the conclusion that we can't expect a solution, especially when you are pointed to a MS knowledgebase article for Windows XP which MS clearly states:- that doing this to your system is a "workaround" to solve an application problem!

In my office, this issue has been escalated and is now a critical issue. Does anybody the list have a viable alternative backup solution, which does what TI is supposed to be able to do without randomly killing the system?

Bernie,

I suspect you have a low-level driver conflict, possibly as a result from upgrading from one version to another. Do you have multiple Acronis devices in the device manager, for example?

I just checked it and there is only one:

"Acronis Backup Archive Explorer"

The current installation of TI 2011 was a clean install, rather than an upgrade.

Cheers,

Bernie.

Bernie,

Try to uninstall ATI, reboot and reinstall.

Does the BSOD happen early in the backup or later? Early could indicate a compatibility issue with snapapi.sys, a core driver of ATI.

I have an nVidia graphics card not ATI and have no snapapi.sys. I did find snapman.sys on the system which I believe is the Acronis application which is responsible for low level disk I/O under Windows.

The BSOD happens at random times during the backup. The evidence left behind is a the temporary file that Acronis creates to build the image. This file seems to be about 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the final archive (hence I'm guessing 20% to 50% through the backup).

ATI means Acronis True Image, sorry about the confusion.

Run a chkdsk -r on your disks. Try the uninstall/reboot/reinstall of ATI.

No problem, I understand. Unfortunately, I have already tried what you suggested. As a matter of practice, I follow this process for any software that had trouble running, before I search for solutions on the net.

Unfortunately, you will need ACronis to analyze your system and Acronis reports to determine what the issue is: you need to file a ticket.

Hello Bernie and Pat,

Thank you for your messages and your valuable help Pat.

Bernie, let me provide you with additional assistance please.

If you like, before contacting our Support team could you let me know the exact BSOD error code and collect this report from your computer.

Looking forward to your reply and if you have additional questions please let me know.

Thank you.

I have turned off Acronis automatic backups so I cannot tell you what the BSOD message is now. As it is intermittent, I am reluctant to turn it back on again. Anyway, attached is the AcronisInfo.zip as requested.

Just another quick note on this issue. The computer with the problems also has a top-end Creative SB X-Fi installed and has the DTS driver enabled. The reason I bring this up is that I feel this is what is clashing with the Acronis software (no evidence, just an engineering hunch). However, all the other software on the machine is running like clockwork (Maya, Sony Vegas, ZBrush, etc.). Acronis TI is the only bad player at the moment, hence, the question on this forum.

Hello Bernie,

Thank you for replying.

From the AcronisInfo alone it is difficult to determine the exact cause of the system BSOD. We need to take a look at the BSOD message and analyze Windows memory dumps which are collected during a BSOD occurrence.

I would recommend the following. If this issue occurs again, please collect these files and contact our Support team directly so that we can resolve the issue for you:

1. AcronisInfo report.

2. BSOD message.

3. Windows memory dump.

Please let me know if you need additional help.

Thank you.

As indicated before, when this problem occurred, it caused a BSOD without a memory dump! No evidence at all. (I have the system set up to create dump files and have used them in the past). If I had a windows memory dump, I would be able to point you in the right direction myself.

Unfortunately, the machines I look after are high-end audio and video editing systems, critical to everyday work and even though I would like to, I can't do software system testing. So for now, I will have run backups manually, until I find a reliable alternative.

So thanks Anton for looking at the report and Pat for trying to help.

Cheers,

Bernie.

Bernie,

Have you looked in the Event Log for the BSOD info? Any information saved there might help Acronis.

That was the first place I checked. Nothing unusual there. The other thing I must note, is that the BSOD is the most severe of the outcomes I had. On other occasions, the PC just locked up, totally dead. No mouse, no keyboard, no GUI update, just dead. On those occasions I had to hard reset the PC. The event log only reported "power failure" - because I reset it.

Now before anybody jumps up and claims hardware fault - I have thoroughly tested that as well. Also note that since I turned off the automatic ATI backups, the system has been running like clockwork.

Hello Bernie and MudCrab,

Thank you for the follow-ups and thank you very much for your assistance MudCrab.

Bernie, if you run into this issue again please feel free to contact me via a private message so that we can work on it.

If you have additional questions please let me know.

Thank you.

Now that Acronis have released a new version (2012) of True Image, I decided to give that a try this morning. NOTE: The machine has no previous version of Acronis installed before I tried.

The new version fails during installation. I have sent the error log to support.

I think my loyalty (or hope) for a good release of this product has just finished today.

I tried to install Acronis TI 2011 first to see if the "upgrade" to 2012 option would work, but the result is the same. For reference, the error log is attached. The first log was an installation on a clean system without Acronis products and the second installation was an attempt to install as a upgrade over TI 2011.