Initial Seeding Confusion
We've ordered initial seeding with the purchase of our second year of Acronis Online / Cloud backups.
This year, instead renewing the single license for our Small Business Server 2011 virtual machine we bought Virtual for Hyper-V to protect the host and its four virtual machines.
We had the expectation that we could create the backup jobs and backup files that we'd need to run in production, copy them to the hard disk, and have them seeded to online storage by Acronis. Ideally, we'd run a backup of the host operating system once a week, and backup each virtual machine to its own file every day. Fair warning to all- Acronis initial seeding required us to create a special backup of all volumes on the Hyper-V host server, which meant all four production servers had to be offline for more than twelve hours (else the backup job fails)....
We've discovered that we would have to order five initial seeding licenses to have our production backup plans copied to the cloud.
After creating the backup, packing and placing the return shipping label per the available help files and articles we shipped the drive out. I received the tracking number from my shipping department the next morning and went back to our initial seeding order on the Acronis website.
Upon clicking on the button to enter tracking information, I was presented with an "Initial Seeding Label" page and instructions that we were to stick it to the hard drive.
According to the page, "Hard drives w/o applied Initial Seeding label may be processed with delay or not processed at all."
PLEASE UPDATE THE DOCUMENTATION TO CALL ATTENTION TO THIS INITIAL SEEDING LABEL. It was not mentioned in the packaging or preparation documents. Due to this fact, Acronis Customer Support doesn't even know there is an initial seeding label.
This has me concerned, as our drive shipped without the initial seeding label. I called Acronis support and was told we do not need the seeding label, as long as we have the shipping label outside and the return shipping label inside. They support tech told me he could not find mention of the initial seeding label anywhere in the documentation (because it's not there), therefore we don't need to send the label.
After finishing the phone conversation with Acronis support, I'm left with the distinct impression that their tech support personnel have not used their product at all.
The advice received has been regurgitated from the online documentation, but not based on any level of expertise with the products themselves..
Can anyone confirm the Initial Seeding Label is purely optional? Anyone have a solid working knowledge of initial seeding and what sort of delays or issues we might have without the label?
Thank you so much for clarifying!
We did purchase new licenses for
Acronis Backup Advanced 11.5 for Hyper-V
Acronis Backup for AnyServer to Cloud 2TB
Initial Seeding for workstation/Server with 2TB disk
We did not purchase the "Acronis Universal License", so it would appear that our production backup job cannot be sent with less than five seed licenses.
It will "only" take twelve days to seed the production backups- we'd be over halfway finished by now if I had simply foregone the initial seeding headache last week...
or if I had known this limitation existed three weeks ago I could have spent the additional $200 for the "Acronis Universal License" instead of buying the "Advanced for Hyper-V" product. (hint: Acronis account managers could mention this when a customer asks for a quote including the Hyper-V, cloud, and initial seeding products)
It would seem "Acronis Universal Restore" should be the logical choice for anyone wishing to run cloud backups on a virtualization host server with more than one virtual machine running under it (that would be nearly ALL virtualization hosts out there) and the intention to initial seed the backup.
It's a shame the "Acronis Backup Advanced for Hyper-V" product doesn't include the same initial seeding privileges as the Universal product- since there would hardly ever be an instance where you had just one virtual machine to seed with your host.
Live and learn...