Useless for backing up and restoring
I have 2013. I also have 2015 but I am pretty sure I am going to uninstall every version I have after this experience. I have a SIMPLE requirement. Make a backup image to a file and the allow me to restore it where ever I choose to restore it. Don't remember where it came from or automatically clean house for me or do a bunch of other stuff just make a backup and allow me to restore it.
I am tired of "can't find version 500 of image blah blah" and all these crazy errors and keeping track of things and making my life generally miserable with "features" that I don't use, don't want, and don't work.
I have a back up file. I want to restore it. It is NOT incremental it is a SINGLE backup image of a single disk. Can someone please tell me how to CLEAR out all these silly versions and blah blah blah that this program remembers and just do a SIMPLE restore? I am trying to essentially clone one disk to another one. I MIGHT have used the clone feature but it appears to have yet a different set of issues. So Please. Just tell me how to CLEAR all the crap this application THINKS it needs.
man- what a waste of my time and money this has turned out to be.
I have done a restore when I am actually replacing a drive by booting from a recovery disk with no problem. In this case I was attempting to back up one external laptop drive and restore the backup to a new laptop drive using my desktop and usb interfaces for the drives. Seems pretty simple. I EVENTUALLY got this to work by having to click through 50 totally irrelevant error messages for old backups that had NOTHING to do with the backup I was currently interesting in addressing. All this "feature rich" crap remembering back up versions and caching history and auto-clean up and blah blah blah is a royal pain. In my way of thinking these aren't features they are hacks. Acronis seems to require that the ONLY way you delete a back up is if you do in IN acronis. It is a pain. At a minimum the application should have a "flush useless history" button so you can unload all the crap about backups that are NOT EVEN RELIVANT to what you are doing or have been deleted manually. I also use several different external backup drives and everything is fine UNTIL you need to do a restore. Same bogus history haunting flow of stupid error messages to click through while the program hunts around for stuff it will never find and SHOULDN"T BE LOOKING FOR. Someone's idea of a feature made a TON of assumptions that only a second semester student would make. Doesn't give ya a lot of confidence about the more critical aspects of a backup/recovery. I am going to look for something to replace this bloatware with an app that doesn't try to "manage" your backups.
I only use this software to backup my current (latest) internal drive with the boot info, OS files and everything else that's on it. I can restore this whole magilla to a twin (internal) drive which I take to my other house on weekends, doing the same thing when I am ready to return to my primary home. You must be doing something I've never tried. Are you backing up just files on an external drive. You said: "I was attempting to back up one external laptop drive". Why not just do a "dd" and create an image file? I could do what I do this way too, but the "dd" method takes a very long time - taking hours to do what Acronis does in 20 minutes.
Okay - I'll take you through the entire painful process.
) I have a laptop with a drive. Let's call it drive LA. It is having issues so my goal was to replace it. I have a new drive. Let's call it LB.
2) I have a desktop. Drives c:, d:, e: and X:. X is a drive I only use for backups. So on X: is a number of incremental backups for c:,d: & e:. I don't really trust the laptop to read the marginal drive so I removed it. I need a backup of the laptop anyway so I decide to back it up using a USB-sata interface to my X: drive just so I have a back up. Plan is to then restore that backup to the new drive the USB to sata interface on the new drive. (identical laptop drives)
3) I plug in the defective drive to the USB-SATA converter on my desktop. Letter assigned is m: I am a little bit low on X: space so I delete some of the older backups of c, d,& e just to clear some space.
4) Now I do a full back up of the marginal drive m: into a new folder on X:. So far no problem. Works perfectly. Now I have a good laptop backup on my X drive and all I need to do is restore it to the new laptop drive and then install that drive into the laptop.
5) So I plug in the new drive on the USB-sata port - So restore the backup of M: on X: to the new drive:. Simple.
NOT simple. I start the restore and immediately start getting a flood of error message. "can't find segment 2 of D: backup, can't find segment 3 of C: backup, can't find this can't find that. Tons of errors. WTH! I am not trying to do Anything with C or D I am simply trying to restore the stand-alone full back up of M: to a new drive. Why is the app going out and checking for backups related to OTHER drives? I clicked thru about 10 of these "can't find" messages and began to wonder what the heck was the silly app trying to do? The app appeared to have lost its mind. I suspect this was the result of me manually deleting some of the older back up but really this is really strange behavior. Again I suspect this has something to do with the manual delete of older backup that may have had "auto-cleanup" turned on but really this is not reasonable behavior. Why did acronis decide for NO reason to start looking for unrelated backup files? I suspect this is some "management" feature gone amuck but it really doesn't not make me confident the thing isn't going to start restoring something I had no intention to restore. I had deleted all of the "tasks" for the c,d,e backups so the scripts for those were gone. For some strange reason acronis seems to have "remembered" those old tasks and was checking the status of ALL of my backups even on drives totally unrelated to what I was trying to do. This to me is a pain. First off it causes me to wonder what the heck it is about to do. Second I deleted those tasks so how about deleting the stupid history related to them?
After clicking thru some crazy number of these "can't find" message the app finally did what I asked it to do but I sure won't EVER turn on the "Auto-cleanup" junk again. What a mess. Just really sloppy behavior in my opinion. Just do what I ask don't try to "manage" my files or versions or anything else. Especially if even AFTER I delete the tasks the thing is going to retain history I am not interested in. This is not the first time I have had to fight with this "version management" silliness. I keep hoping ancronis will "fix" this junk on their next version but so far if anything it is getting worse.
If I was trying to setup a new drive in a laptop I would do just what you did: steps 1 through 4. My step 5 would be to put the new drive into the laptop and (using my USB Acronic drive inserted into one of the available slots on the laptop) boot up and run the Acronis restore. This is assuming several things. My backup file will be *accessible once I'm running Acronis and the new drive is "ready", that is to say it has been formatted to the correct file-system you use.
* To avoid having to access your backup file via an external (USB-connected?) drive you could have this file already on the Acronis USB one - but that would require a hefty USB drive ($).
[Added Later] I should say that for me swapping internal drives is a snap... power off, slide old out, slide new in... presto! That's one of the beauties of the Thinkpad (T61)