Wasted recovery time on a 2 disk system when only 1 disk failed
Late last night, my C: failed. It's a SSD and only has Windows 7 X64 on it. I keep all my current work in progress on D:. Luckily I have a server which has the real data on it.
Last night I went to bed thinking that Acronis wil restore to a new C: in the morning and I'll be back up and working in no time. WOW .. was I wrong! I purchased the new drive, installed it, found my recovery disk and then started restoring the image. It insisted on recovering both disks. My D: had current work on, but I was confident that Acronis had backed it up ( I run "non-stop backup", and what else would a product named this do ?). I tried all sorted of tricks NOT to recover D:, even physically unplugging the device, but my only option was to recover. OK .. I held a lot of trust in Acronis and pressed the button.
After a respectable 20 minutes, my C: was formatted and recovered .. nearly done I thought. Then D: drive was formatted and recovered .. it took 90 minutes. Yes, it's bigger, but I really didn't want to recover it anyway. I logged onto Windows - yippee, all looked good. Windows found some new hardware - probably the new C: drive and wanted to reboot. I said "Restart now" and then up came "Operations are in progress. Please wait.". I thought this was a standard Windows 7 message, so waited for 10 minutes .. then did some googling on my phone and came across many, many posts from VERY unhappy Acronis users - this message, and untimely delay was from True Image. After 50 minutes, I crossed my fingers, toes and anything else I could find and held the reset button. Luckily Windows restarted OK .. but I am now back 2 days on my D: drive (data drive). I went searching for ways to restore my "non-stop backup", but with every attempt I made I found a "TrueImage.exe" running at around 25% CPU using 250MB of ram, doing absolutely nothing. I waited 10 minutes for True Image to respond .. but no go.
What a joke. Acronis - I am running 2012 on my Windows 7 X64 box, and I am now looking at alternative backup systems. You need to listen to the many posts about the "Operations are in progress" message and realise that real users can't have a 2 hour delay while doing a quick shutdown - it is NOT acceptable.
My other issue of recovering a drive that did not need to be recovered, and in the process wiping out 2 days of work that the "non-stop backup" didn't seem to back up is also unacceptable.
I'd be very interested in your comments on this.
Gary
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Thanks for your reply Colin.
Based on what you said, I guess that NSB should have been able to give me the "files and folders" that have been modified since the image backup of 2 days ago. It not very intuitive - finding the files to restore over the last 2 days .. they just aren't there.
I believe I have the correct configuration - image backup for disk failure, NSB for files & folders .. BUT NSB was of no use in this case.
In fact, I just re-examined the folder where the .TLB backups (is this where NSB stores it's backups?) and I can't see any for the past few weeks, and one created today - probably the shutdown "operations in progress" backup. I am guessing that NSB may not have been working. I only reboot occasionally.
It's been a frustrating experience.
I was just looking at "Recover" under non-stop backup and "Acronis True Image Home has stopped working" .. has popped up. This really is a bit of a joke. I certainly can't rely on this software at all. In my opinion (as a software developer) .. it's the GUI that has stopped, the background services should still be running (and performing backups) .. but I really have no way of being sure. I think I'll just have to find another product.
Gary
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Gary,
Sorry I thought you were trying to recover the OS from the NSB storage.
Check to see if the NSB Service (afcdpsrv) is running and set to automatic and logs on to Local system Account. I thought the NSB folder was Timeline Explorer, but it could have changed since the beta.
If you click on the drive letter in the task, it will take you to the correct folder, see my attached screenshot.

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