ATIH 2011 FTP connection bugs
I recently bought ATIH 2011 to backup my Windows 7 PC to an FTP server (A QNAP NAS box) on the strength of reviews of their previous products.
I could not get the "New FTP Connection" to work at all. I checked the syntax with the manual, turned on debugging and sniffed the network with Wireshark packet analyser. Finally I have discovered what is going on - and hopefully this message will save others a great deal of pain and wasted time. The syntax for entering a connection is described in the manual as follows:
FTP connection
Acronis True Image Home 2011 allows you to store your backups on FTP servers.
When saving backups on an FTP server, you should provide:
- Full path to the backup file (including .tib extension), for example: ftp://my.server.com/myfolder/mybackup.tib
- Port
- User name
- Password
To check your settings click the Test connection button. The computer will try to connect to the specified FTP server. If the test connection has been established, click the Connect button to add the FTP connection.
However this is not what the code itself does. When I looked the packets I found that my computer was trying to find an IP address for a system called "ftp" on my network. It turns out that the code interprets everything BEFORE the :// as the hostname. So for the above syntax to work you would need to write it as:
my.server.com://myfolder/mybackup.tib
but don't rush to make that change... there is more to come...
Next, despite the fact that the manual tells you to include the name of a file (ending in .tib) it actually treats all of the elements as directories, so it will try to list the directory "mybackup.tib" on your FTP server - which usually fails. So don't bother putting a filename as the last element.
Finally it seems that it doesn't actually use the port number field to determine what port to connect on - instead it tacks a colon plus the port number onto the end of the filename that it sends to the FTP server!
So... to make all this work what I had to do was the following:
On my NAS server (hostname "nas") I created a folder called /Backups/AcronisG:21/.
Then in the add FTP connection dialogue I entered a path of nas://Backups/AcronisG and port number 21. This successfully added an FTP connection. Buggy code or what????
Here is an excerpt form ATIH's own DebugLog file:
New log entry started on 2010-09-26 21:13:33
Connected to nas
<- 220 NASFTPD Turbo station 2.x 1.3.1rc2 Server (ProFTPD) [192.168.0.110]
-> FEAT
<- 211-Features:
<- LANG en
<- MDTM
<- UTF8
<- REST STREAM
<- SIZE
<- 211 End
-> USER ftp
<- 331 Password required for ftp
-> PASS *****
<- 230 User ftp logged in
-> SYST
<- 215 UNIX Type: L8
-> PWD
<- 257 "/" is the current directory
-> CWD /Backups/AcronisG:21
<- 250 CWD command successful
-> TYPE A
<- 200 Type set to A
-> PASV
<- 227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,0,110,219,65).
-> LIST
<- 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for file list
<- -rw-rw-rw- 1 ftp everyone 0 Sep 26 17:05 MyMail.tib
<- 226 Transfer complete
Now that I have my FTP connection in place I tried do a document backup and a mail backup. Sadly neither works... in one case I was repeatedly prompted for my Windows credentials until I gave up. In the other I was prompted for a password for "\\nas" - which is presumably a Windows share - I don't have Windows shares on my NAS box.
So - all in all - I would say that the FTP functionality in ATIH 2011 is very badly broken. I'm beginning to wish I hadn't purchased this product... come on Acronis - what about a fix?
I absolutely agree this is the only way to get FTP to work using my Synology Diskstation.
Hello,
Any news on this because I've the same issue with a Synology NAS and have logged a call to the support giving the link to this thread and as a first reply, they asked me if passive FTP was enabled (it is...).
Anton your status is "online", any news ?
For the others, does someone has had a chance to make a backup on an FTP server as advertised by Acronis ?.
If yes with which FTP server ?
Thx
David
Hello Dex,
Thank you for your comment. I will do my best to assist you.
I am sorry for any inconvenience. Currently there is a known issue with backups to a Synology NAS, there is a hotfix available from Synology support. Please check this article for more information.
If it is a different issue, I would recommend working with our Support representative and I am confident we will get this problem resolved.
Please let me know if you require additional assistance.
Thank you.
Hello Anton,
This fix is for Samba/Cifs access and doesn't have any link with FTP access.
I'm in DSM 2.3 so not affected by the 3.0 issue.
The original poster of this thread has a QNAP, not a synology, and is facing the same issue.
I've already opened a support call and the only mail that I've add is to verify that my NAS was supporting passive FTP which is the case. since then, no news.
David