PGP Whole Disk Encryption & True Image Home 2010
Hope this is not in the wrong area, I wanted to post against the article that says "We are not compabitle with PGP...", but it did not appear to allow me to do that.
First question (easy one!):
* True Image Home 2010 does not appear to be mentioned in any of the PGP articles discussing lack of compatiblity (I assume this is just an oversight?)
Second question:
* There are a scary number of references saying that PGP whole disk encryption does not work with your product. Please tell me you are working on providing a robust backup solution to work on the rapidly gowing market for whole disk encryption?
The whole point of buying your product is that I don't have to worry about such issues ?
Hello all,
There are two possible workarounds to backup a partition or hard disk encrypted with PGP software:
- Decrypt the partition or hard disk before backing it up. You can encrypt again after the restore;
- Back up the encrypted partition or hard disk from Acronis Bootable Media in sector-by-sector mode. See Creating a Sector-By-Sector Backup with Acronis Products.
We are aware of the compatibility issues with encryption software, they may be fixed in the future versions of Acronis programs.
I am in total agreement. It's seems absurb to market a product as a disk backup solution, and then even suggest that I have to disable PGP in the section(s) of the disk I'm interested in (OMG ... get real) to use your product. I will uninstall and look for a different product.
Hello Rick,
Welcome to Acronis Forum, we're glad you joined us.
I completely understand your concern and be sure your comments will be forwarded to the Management team for finding a way to improve the situation.
You can find more details regarding the reason of compatibility issues between Acronis software and encryption software in this comment.
I cannot say that we do not support encryption - there just can be several issues due to the style of accessing the drive by our product.
Anyway thank you for your comment and your opinion - we really appreciate it.
Should you need anything else or have any further questions - feel free to contact us at your earliest convenience, we will be happy to help you!
Thank you!
Hi all,
First of all, we would like to know what problem exactly you are experiencing with PGP, if you have tried it already.
Second, I would like to point out that encryption is targeted for enterprise customers. Although it can be used by home users, of course, PGP and other encryption vendors design the product for enterprises. In the same way as Acronis True Image Home 2010 and Acronis Backup&Recovery 10 are targeted for different sectors (first one for home users, and second one for enterprises). Should you want to backup a workstation that is used for work purposes, it is better to use Acronis Backup&Recovery 10.
Third, you need to understand that a backup solution and encryption try to go in oposite directions. One is trying to copy your data, to avoid data loose in case of a disaster, and the other one is trying to avoid unauthorized access, and restrict the access to the data as much as possible. This, of course, means that an interaction between the two products is likely, since their architectures are designed for completely different purposes.
Anyway, if you install Acronis, and take a backup of from Windows, you should be able to restore it. The only inconvenient is that once the system is restored, it will be unencrypted.
One thing that you need to notice is that PGP generates a file called C:/pgpwde01. Actually, there is a file with this name in the root of every partition. You will need to exclude this file. Otherwise, when Acronis reaches this file, it will start erroring out saying that it can't be read, since it is locked by PGP's low level driver.
Hi,
Thanks for the comments back. I had read Oleg's comments, and acted upon it, but I had missed a very subtle and VERY important point!
The interesting part was not the sector-by-sector - BUT using the boot media to do the backup! My main point is - is there an easy way to do this that reliably allows me to restore my machine if there is a problm?
The answer appears to be clearly yes, but it's not ideal.
So please don't stop the research & development around this, there are many users out there who will make use of this.
Asier,
Interesting response. That last note about the PGP file made sense, that must be the file I tell arconis to skip during backup.
Question back if "Acronis Backup&Recovery 10" does cover this, why do none of the posts say this?
Next point is - there are 2 people in my company, but I have government contracts that require encryption. I don't want the expense of enterprise products (and that's expense in terms of time and money).
You've got a great product, I expect this is going to be a growing market place (small people, small budget, no real infrastructure) - why not try and be a key player in this area?
I understand, from a "techie" perspective, why you make your third point. But for the small guy encryption and backup are the same (I use your AES encryption option on my backups so my laptop is secure, and my backup).
Thanks,
Hi Frank,
Sorry for the late answer.
You make really good points.
Regarding our different line of products, Acronis True Image Home is designed for home users, but this does not prevent you from using it in a regular workstation at work. The main difference comes from usability, some features, and specially the support programs.
Acronis True Image Home does has a pay per incident support, while Acronis Backup&Recovery 10 has maintenance programs that allow you to have unlimited amount of support tickets raised for one year. Also, Acronis Backup&Recovery 10 has different scheduling algorithms, in order to suit better a work environment, while Acronis True Image Home is mainly designed for home computers.
The price difference between Acronis True Image Home and Acronis Backup&Recovery 10 is not that big, so it is not an obstacle to move to Acronis Backup&Recovery 10. To be honest, you need to pick up the software that is most comfortable for your environment.
About including encryption support for our products, including home products, I will raise the issue to our product management team.
Let me know if you have any other question. I'll be glad to help you out.
Thanks.
I can confirm that a sector-by-sector backup of a PGP encrypted drive can NOT be restored to another drive.
Having read a lot of articles on this forum, which state that you can backup a PGP encrypted drive if you do it sector-by-sector from the bootable media, I have bought "Acronis True Image 11".
But as I found out the hard way, it seems that the backup is completely useless if you need to restore the backup to another harddrive (e.g. because the original drive is broken). PGP will not boot into this recovered drive,
probably because it takes into account hardware serial-numbers or so to do the encryption.
So the only way to backup your PGP encrypted system is probably using the workaround (see above) of creating the backup IN Windows (hence unencrypted), and afterwards fixing your MBR.
However, this means that your backup will NOT be encrypted, which kind of defeats the purpose of having an encryption on your harddrive in the first place...
So, in contrast with what I have read so far on this forum,
this means that "Acronis True Image 11" is in fact useless when you have PGP encryption.