Some Microsoft Word Docs restored from Non-Stop-Backup have size 0

I have also had this SAME problem. I needed to recover several key MS Word documents. After I restored them, they all had file sizes of zero--the documents were blank.

I followed the same procedures as above and am running the same release. Can Acronis please assist?

Thank You.

Richard Ori

Hi there.

Just a small update: I ran into the issue again with files in other locations. They are also Word documents (all Office 2002).
It would already help if somebody could tell me if my files are gone for good or not...

Thanks

I spent hours attempting to recover my Word documents with no avail. I ended up having to do a restore from a stand-alone backup I did two months ago. The moral of this story is to perform a stand-alone backup regulary and NOT rely soley on Acronis Non-stop Backup.

It would be nice if Acronis could address this issue. I filled out a ticket over one month ago and never heard back from them.

Richard

Good to know Richard. In that case I'll do something about the situation myself (as far as possible) and quit waiting.

@Acronis
PLEASE hire some more poeple for the forum jobs. This is just frustrating.

Hello Alfred and Richard,

I'm really sorry for the delay with the response, I'll do everything possible to help you and fix the issue.

However, first I need some additional information to investigate the issue:

• Please create a report using AcronisInfo utility and attach it to your reply;
• Please make a screen shot of the original Word files' sizes and of the restored ones and attach them to the reply.

We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

Hi Ilya

Thanks for lending us an ear.

Unfortunately, I was not able to create the report using AcronisInfor Utility since I got an error message (I'm on Windows 7, I ran the file with admin privileges). I attached the error message in "AcronisInfo_problem". However, to give you as much information as possible, I downloaded AcronisReport separately and attached the report file.
I have also attached a screen shot of the files in Time Explorer ("docs_in_TE") showing the expected file sizes and one of the files restored to the hard drive ("docs_restored"), showing that most of the files have no size.

Hope this helps.

Hey Ilya

Any news yet? I'm a bit under pressure.

Cheers
Alfred

I think I have it FIXED Alfred...

I had previously installed the new version of Acronis TI OVER the previous version. This is the situation in which I have been getting zero file sizes in my restored MS Word documents.

Currently, I did a COMPLETE un-install of Acronis TI including manually going into the Windows Registry and deleting entries that the uninstall didn’t remove. I rebooted and then installed TI 2010 version 6053. You will need to point the non-stop backup to the location of your previous non-stop backup partition. I restored several MS Word documents from the version in the NSB databases. All restores of the Word documents worked well. I manually checked each Word document.

Things seem to work well for me now with TI so hopefully this will help you to resolve your issues as well.

Good Luck!!!

Wow, great!

TI 2010 is the first acronis product I've ever used. But I did install the update over the old installation without uninstalling the old one. So maybe something went wrong.

It will be a few days until I'll be able to try that out. I'll report back then.

Thanks for letting me know. Hugely appreciated!

Cheers,
Alfred

Ok, here goes:

I did as you discribed Richard but sadly to no avail. I tried several times, using the clean up utility (because there's a bug in the uninstaller [what a surprise...]) and removing the remaining entries from the registry manually.

I have actually been able to recover nearly all (one still had size 0) the docs from a date I was not able to before. Sadly that doesn't help, because the changes I made happened after that date.

So for me the problem is still not solved. But thanks again for the input Richard.

@Ilya
I did run into weird behaviour once though (and I've actually seen that message before): when I tried to recover the files from the nonstop backup via the recovery function without connecting it to the nonstop backup first (Recovery -> Disk Backups) I got a message saying, that there had been an error decompressing the archive and the program would crash (so I couldn't even post the error report to the dev team).

I have read a lot of posts from people (in diverse forums) who are really unhappy with several aspects of the software and I add myself to that list. There are many stability issues and bugs that need to be resolved. I cannot see how a product designed for security purposes can be shipped with so many problems persisting.

Anyhow, Ilya I'd be very greatful if you could at least give me the status of my problem, because if I have to wait much longer (and by much I mean more than a week) I'll just rewrite what I can't recover (although that's a lot of work).

Alfred

Update

I installed a fresh Windows 7 on another machine, installed ATI 2010 (6053) on it and plugged in the external hard drive containing the backup for the other machine. I then used Recovery -> Disk Backups to restore files from that non stop backup (just to clarify: I'm talking about the same backup I've been talking about in this thread). I again got the same error message that I described in my last post.

Just so you know that it doesn't seem to be a problem of the system the software runs on (i.e. usb drivers etc.).

Alfred

Well, nobody seems to read this thread anymore so I'll announce it closed.

One thing though (to everyone with a similar problem, hoping it's not to late): DO NOT(!) rely solely on Nonstop backup for backing up your drives. Also use OneClick backup to create snapshots from time to time. This will (hopefully) prevent something like what happened to me to happen to you.

Oh, and just so I've said it again: ACRONIS: HIRE MORE POEPLE TO DO THE FORUM SUPPORT!!! PLEEEEEEEEASE! The current situation sucks (excuse my language).

Cheers,
Alfred

Alfred Keller wrote:

Well, nobody seems to read this thread anymore so I'll announce it closed. One thing though (to everyone with a similar problem, hoping it's not to late): DO NOT(!) rely solely on Nonstop backup for backing up your drives. Also use OneClick backup to create snapshots from time to time. This will (hopefully) prevent something like what happened to me to happen to you.

Many of us long-standing users of TI suggest that you do not use TI for data backups such as documents and pictures but use either one of the free backup software solutions that don't use propriety file systems as TI does  <removed due to the violation of Acronis Forum rules>. This way you will have the files stored in their native format and you will be able to copy or open individual files as required.

Hello Alfred Keller and como,

Alfred Keller,

Thank you very much for your patience and I am sorry for not replying earlier. I would really like to assist you in resolving this issue.

I have carefully studied your description of the nonstop backup problem and I have also checked with our experts and quality assurance team.

We will need some additional information to get this resolved. Is it possible to perform additional restores, so that we can detect some sort of pattern? Are all the files that you restore, equal to zero bytes, limited only to some word documents in 1 folder? What happens if you try to restore other folders with different files, .exe, .pdf?

Can you please provide us with additional diagnostic information?

1. Windows System Information File.

2. Contents of the whole folder: C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome

3. If you are willing to do this, maybe you could record a video of the steps taken by you, it will greatly help us in investigating this issue.

- You can use this freeware utility to capture
desktop video : http://camstudio.org/. It saves everything to .avi file.

The utility is very simple:
A. Launch CamStudio
B.  Check Region->Full screen in the menu (Please note it would capture
video only from 1 monitor in case you have multi-monitor desktop)
C. Press Record button
D. Reproduce the problem starting from very beginning to capture all backup settings
on the video
E. Press on Stop button
F. Enter file name

After gathering all the logs, can you please submit a support request with all the logs attached and let me know the case number, so that I can take personal care of this issue.

como,

Thank you for the feedback provided, we really appreciate it.

I would like to apologize for the inconvenience met with the file restoration and would like to assure you, that we actually receive a very low % of complaints regarding this feature of the product, and we definitely have a fix for all this complaints. So I would appreciate if you could kindly notify us in case you run into this problem or contact support directly  - we will definitely help you

I just purchased this product and I am having the same problem. With both Word Documents and Excel, when I recover documents backed up in nonstop backup, they are corrupted. When you open the documents they are blank.

I purchased this product because I was unhappy with Norton Ghost, but now I see that Acronis is no better. I am extremely unhappy. Backup and restore software is the most important software on your system. If it does not work, it is completely useless.

I see this was posted in January and the comment made was "we definitely have a fix for all this complaints". However, I see no fixes being offered by Acronis. When is the fix for this coming? I need it now!

Hello Angelo Giambra,

Thank you very much for your post and I will definitely assist you.

Please accept my sincerest apologies for the inconvenience. Unfortunately at the moment there is no fix for this, however, if you would be kind enough to provide us with additional information that I posted in this reply. As soon as I get it I will escalate this issue to our Expert and Quality assurance team, so that they can reproduce it and fix this problem.

You can send the information to your existing case and once it is there, I will take ownership of it and escalate it.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Thank you very much for your patience.

Does this mean we can't use the words such as "Karen's Replicator (KR)" anymore?

Advice on alternative solutions especially those that are free and have been proven to work efficiently has been a hallmark of this forum when at Wilders and here until now.

I have never seen a complaint about restoring files using KR but have seen a litany of problems where people have lost critical data files due to corrupt tibs

I would think very few people purchase TI to only backup files. Most would use it to backup whole drives partitions
TI is not a reliable enough product for me to entrust my critical data files to however it is an excellent product for partition and drive complete manual backups and restoration on my system.

I can understand a problem if people are promoting commercial competitors products but this is not the case here.

What about a re-think Acronis?

I don't have a solution for this problem, but I have found what causes a recovery from Nonstop Backup to generate a size 0 file. Using Microsoft Excel, or Word (2007), if I create a new file, or use the Save As command, the file will always restore properly. But if I make a change to a file and simply quit the file and respond "Yes" to saving the file, or choose the Save option then quit, the file will always be recovered by Nonstop Backup as 0 size. Obviously having to always choose Save As is not the easiest thing to remember, so this is a problem with True Image Home 2010. But perhaps this information will be of help to Acronis in resolving this issue.

Ndryer I appreciate your comments. I've lost my faith in this product. I need to be able to have complete faith that my files will be restored when that disaster happens. Having worked with computers all my life, I am too familiar with their quirky ways. I'm tired of software vendors providing "solutions" that have not been adequately tested and I'm tired of tech support people who seem to have an overload of training on saying the right things (we are so sorry for your inconvenience, we will definitely find a solution to your problem) but not enough training on actually providing a solution.

Enough people have complained about this issue that I am convinced Acronis can easily duplicate this on their testbed rather than putting the burden on its users to provide dumps of their systems. Earlier in this thread I see that a user has already provided the info they requested, yet no fix is forthcoming.

If they took the time to delve into it they could find a solution but I see no effort on their part to do this. They only respond when someone writes a nasty letter and then all they do is ask for a dump of your system. Big help!

Angelo:

Perhaps if PC World, Infoworld, PC Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, etc. were contacted, it would prompt Acronis to get off of their rumps and get us a fix.

I simply had to stop using TI 2010 due to two persistent errors that Acronis can not seem to fix. These errors have caused me to loose key data files which I thought were safely backed up.

Very frustrating to put it nicely...

Today i attempt to recover a complete directory. What happens? Some files are now set to filesize ZERO!!

The best thing: If i extract an older version of the now empty file. The Recovery-Dialog tells me that the current destfile (now really empty file -> filesize 0 bytes) has bytes in it, and therefore ask me if i really want to overwrite it with the backuped EMPTY file???
In the version history are 8 versions listed. If i extract one of them, the extracted file is then empty on the dest. If i extract again, the recovery - dialog says there are bytes in the destfile.... BUT the destfile is really empty!

You made some mistake in source and dest definition of the extraction sequence.. Look there, Mr. and. Mrs. Acronis. Why is an empty destfile holding data? And why is the backup source shown empty in the recovery warning dialog????

Dear customers,

We understand that this is very inconvenient for you to face the issue with documents recovery in our product. And we would be glad to fix it for you, I have consulted with our QA Team and they are ready to accept the case, but it's not possible to test the issue without the information requested by Anton in the post #14.

So we would really appreciate if you submit several cases with the information requested and provide us with the numbers.

Thank you.

Acronis,
You can test this problem yourself quicker and easier than requesting data from your customers.

Simply open any Microsoft Word, or Microsoft Excel file, make a small change of any sort, then quit the program, when you are asked if you want to save the changes, respond "Yes". Then in a few minutes, check the nonstop backup and you will see that the changed file is there, but it has 0 bytes. Then you can open the Word, or Excel file again, make a change, go to the File menu and select "Save As", then quit the program. In a few minutes, check the nonstop backup and you will find the changed file as it should be - not 0 bytes. In other words your program fails to record changes unless the user performs a "Save As" command. It will not perform properly with a "Save" to a changed Word, or Excel file.

Now isn't that easier than asking your customers to perform a lot of work trying to send you data so you can postpone taking any action, and you have the added benefit of knowing that you have all you need because it is on your computer!

Hello all,

I would like to thank you for your patience and apologize for the inconvenience and requests for diagnostic information.

Due to the complex nature of various hardware and software scenarios, it is very difficult to reproduce an issue.

However, we got the necessary diagnostic information from one of our customers and this issue is now being worked on by our Quality Assurance team. As soon as they confirm this problem, I will update you about this.

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

Hello all,

I would like to update you about the status of this issue.

Our Quality Assurance team has successfully reproduced it and forwarded this to our Development team.

I would like to apologize for the inconvenience and I will update you once a fix is available.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Thank you.

Hello all,

I am going to update the thread.

The issue has been fixed by our developers, the update will be available in the next released build. The exact date of the release is unknown, we expect it soon. 

Please do not hesitate to ask additional questions if the provided information is not clear or you need a further assistance. 

Thank you.

 Hello all,

We have released a new build of Acronis True Image Home 2010 # 7046. I would recommend you to update the software to the latest build. Please see Release notes for your information, the issue has been addressed in this build.

You can learn more on how to download the latest build here. 

Here are the articles available in our Knowledge base: 

Acronis True Image Home 2010: Updating to build 7046 

Acronis True Image Home 2010 Plus Pack: Updating to build 7046 

Please do not hesitate to ask additional questions if the provided information is not clear or you need a further assistance. 

Thank you.