Acronis Backup and Recovery Wishlist
Dear Customers!
As all you know, your opinion, and suggestions are very important for us. We create, design and change our products to fit all your requirements, and to ensure you that your data is safe.
Many of you forward us their suggestions, and all of them are immediately forwarded to the Product Management and Development teams. Rest assured that all such enhancement requests are paid accurate attention, and our Teams look into the possibility to implement the requested feature in future. We create our plans for future products basing on your opinion about current ones, your feedback and comments.
So we would appreciate if you could share your thoughs with us in this thread. Please, let us know what functions you would like to see added/removed from the product, what GUI or documentation enhancements are required.
Thank you!
Dear Tlen!
Thanks a lot, forwarded!
This is a great idea. By the way, I like what our asset management software vendor does - they have a list of requested enhancements and allow users to "vote" on them. That way they know what is the most requested feature.
My wishlist:
- Ability to copy tasks with all their parameters (for instance creating Full and Incremental backups for Simple Named backup files - they are 2 tasks, but the setting should be the same except for the backup type)
- Option to list date and time of the last backup instead of how long time ago
- Have the Log open to today's date by default
- Keep default settings between versions
Thanks!
Pavla
- a display for all client backuptasks on ams
- start a policy for clients on ams
thanks!
Hello Wolfram,
Welcome to our Forum!
Suggestions forwarded, thank you for sharing!
1. add a plug-in QPKG so Storage Node can be installed on Linux based NAS. (see http://www.qnap.com/QPKG.asp)
2. save credentials of NAS vaults using domain\username when viewing in AMS dashboard.
I had installed Acronis Home 2010 on my notebook. (Win7 Pro, using external passport drive to backup)
Upgraded to Acronis 2011 when it became available.
I then downloaded the recent update about a week ago, but did not install it.
I do this today. It goes through the whole procedure but when it runs it tells me the trial period has expired? WTF?
Now I have to dig up the 2011 license key, but wiat, there is worse, it also want the licence key for 2010, because it think I am installing an upgrade! Why should I keep such information? OK, I go to this website and get it via my registration information.
But what if I would have installed it while I am on holiday, out of my office and with no internet access? I would have been totally stuffed.
This is not good at all.
Please make the upgrades in a way which does not have the potential to cripple a system's backup program good and solid.
It should at least be possible to run it in trial version mode for a new trial period.
I hate to post this into the wrong forum, but ...
>But what if I would have installed it while I am on holiday, out of my office and with no internet access?
Install it in trial mode and have 30 days to dig up keys. Unless you wish to create bootable media that can perform backups, that is not available in trial mode.
1. add a plug-in QPKG so Storage Node can be installed on Linux based NAS. (see http://www.qnap.com/QPKG.asp)
2. save credentials of NAS vaults using domain\username when viewing in AMS dashboard.
+1 agreed to this.
Thank you, guys, requests forwarded!
My Wishlist for ABR 10
I wish that Acronis would release an update of ABR that actually installs over the existing one. I have had to wipe my servers and reinstall EVERYTHING, EVERY time I have attempted to update.
This includes the newest release as of January 2011. Just tried to install it...nope, uninstall the old one first and lose everything. Yay.
I am a corporate user managing over 200 pc's and this is completely unsupportable and we're about to pull the plug on Acronis.
How about an agent that actually deploys and installs. I have to manually (locally) uninstall and reinstall the agent on every machine on the floor, every time.
Management server configuration that ports forward with the new version so I don't have to re-add every machine, rebuild all of my policies, and completely reconfigure the management server every time.
A feature to search for an existing file showing revision history on it. Browsing through the images is extremely difficult and time consuming. Trying to find the last time a file was changed takes way longer than it should.
Services that don't crash constantly.
:-(
Coming from a Backup Exec background but preferring ABR, I'd like to see the following.
1. Recipient lists: Where you can specify your recipients that you can send Print / SMS / SNMP / Email alerts too.
2. Recipient categories: Where you can send an alert based upon an event using the recipient lists above ie. successful backups to the client only. Warnings to the client, client manager and service provider (outsourced I.T.) errors to the Outsourced IT. only.
3. Better support for USB drives as a destination: We use ABR as a backup solution for clients, we'd like ABR to follow the Windows Backup system where you can designate 1 or more drives as destinations and hot swap them without reconfiguring the script.
4. Backup to USB drive without having to create a share so remote computer could use the drive as a destination without having to create a vault.
5 View a backup to USB destination without having to log-on locally and view it as a personal folder.
6. AMS task view where the Managed entity tasks (backup, Validate etc) are nestled so they are logically grouped together. Current status would be the root status for the entity with a + symbol to expand the view to review the entities separate tasks.
There is more but ABR is a great tool. Just a few user and device niggles.
Chris
Paul and Christian,
Thank you for your comments! Forwarded to the Product Management and Development teams.
Paul, your frustration is understandable. Actually, the product update and service crashing issues you report indicates rather serious conflict in the drivers or registry, which requires investigation. I can see only old closed cases regarding technical problems. Have you submitted new case with the latest issue description? (If you did, please, let me know it's number).
Thank you once again for your comments and cooperation!
I would like to have more customization in the differential backup. Since I do differential backups of C drive every day, the backup drive fills up very quickly with the result that I often have to manually delete several backups to make room. For this, I would like to be able to determine which backups to be deleted by the date or, if the backup disk is full, delete a n number of backups from last to first (full backup) but, of course, without cancel the first backup.
For better understanding, suppose that after 15 differential backups, the disk is almost full and the next backup cannot be done. Then, TIH automatically remove the last 7 or 10 backup based on the options chosen. I guess the options as follows (in red box):
I do not mean something like automatic consolidation or version chain
scheme. But just an automatic deletion.
But, why delete the last n differential versions? Because, as known, over time Windows tends to malfunction. So then you can retrieve the more similar to the current one working version, without returning to the first installation.
Bad Url noted:
when you get an errocode on a failed installed installation attempt, a dialogbox pops up with a n url of http://www.acronis.com/errorcode/.
for me, that url code gives me 404 error.
thanks
Hire a professional release manager and QA team to test the software BEFORE you release it to customers. I'm sure the support folks are sick of taking lumps over other peoples' failures, but management has to realize B&R 10 has simply been an appalling and innexcusably shoddy product.
Hi all!
Thank you for your comments, they are forwarded to the Development team. We sincerely appreciate your feedback, and rest assured it's taken under consideration.
Dear David, thank you for the notification. I understand that you have issues with the installation, and I'd like to help you with it. Could you please refer to this thread?
Milt2010, and Mike, thank you for your comments and feedback!
Let us know if you have any additional suggestions, we'll be glad to pass them to the Development and Management team.
Thank you!
Hi
I use the Recovery for Exchange on a lot of our installs of this so better integration between the two I suppose the SQL version as well.
An improved GUI (epecially the dashboard) so I can look at all backups at a glance.
I have had a lot of problems with ABR 10 so extensive testing would be good for the next version.
Thanks
Dear Chris,
Thank you for your comments and feedback, we really appreciate it.
I have forwarded it to the Development team via our Customer Listening System, and we'll have them look into the possibility of adding the better integration and new GUI to the upcoming releases. We'll also make sure that the product is tested appropriately.
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!
Functionality suggestion for more complex networks for Acronis Backup and Restore:
Client agent polling to the Acronis Management server and opening the conection to the Management Server would enable for NAT traversal, instead of the Management Server needing to contact each client by IP.
Example scenario: 10 clients behind a NAT (router) can see the Acronis Management Server, Storage Vault, can get license, etc. However, the Acronis Management Server sees the Router, but can't go past it to see each client, thus the system can't currently work.
Similar example: 3 machines behind a router on a cable modem trying to perform backup to the company Acronis Server with no VPN. The machines can ping the Acronis server, but the Server can't ping the machines, thus the system currently wouldn't work.
If a client could open the connection to the server,(instead of relying on the management server opening connection to the client) check in with backup policy, be able to start backup, etc, then the system would work.
Thanks!
In older versions of Acronis I've been able to specify the archive file splitting size. For example I use 3.83 GB rather than the default DVD size so that 6 of these files will fit nicely on a Blu-Ray 25GB disk.
The company I work for just upgraded to the latest version of Backup & Recovery 10 and when trying to set up a backup the program would not accept the 3.83 GB value. It only seems to allow the pre-set values. Since Blu-Ray BD-R 25GB and 50GB disks are becoming more common, it would be nice to have those options as well.
Our current setup has a full backup go to a NAS box on the network and from there they are burned onto Blu-Ray disks for off-site archiving.
Thanks!
Hi,
- unsatisfied on the of Acronis support. When I raise ticket to support, the support only suggest to update the Acronis to the latest verion, doesn't provide any solution or workaround method to solve the problem. I need to find the solution on google by myself.
- some problem raised to the Acronis support, the support will say "never see that problem" and suggest to update. But after a few weeks, i found that the problem is posted on the Acronis KB and will improve on the next version (maybe a bug on the current version).
- no email sent after the validation task completed.
- the stability of the virtual appliance, always disconnet between the VA and AMS
Thanks...
Hello Albert,
Thank you for posting and I appreciate your honest feedback.
I have forwarded your comments about support to our Management team and I apologize for any inconvenience.
E-mail notifications for validation is currently not supported but our Development team is working on implementing this feature in a future version of our software.
The stability of the virtual appliance needs to be investigated and I am certain that we will be able to help you with it.
Sviatoslav and Lance, I have forwarded your comments to our Program Management team, thank you.
If you have additional questions, please let me know.
Thank you.
The quality of first-level support might be acceptable for a mass-market consumer product, but it is totally unacceptable for a product that is being marketed to and used by business as a mission-critical application. Reading from a script that instructs every caller on their initial call to download the "latest version" of whatever because it is full of fixes is unacceptable. I have been told by support that even though I have a recently downloaded version, and it's the same version that is currently on the web site, I must download again because Acronis slipstreams fixes without incrementing the version number. It's clear that the support reps have no idea whether this is true in a given case; they just say it because that's what they have been told to do, and it kicks the can down the road.
ABR10 is currently on probation at my firm after a series of particularly annoying and time-wasting support calls. Renewal of support, and purchase of the next version, is definitely not going to be automatic.
But it's not just the support. Sure, some manager has clearly decided to pad numbers by outsourcing support to some poor group, then damned them to failure by neglecting to create any system fat knowledge sharing between the organizations. But the QA on this product is absolutely atrocious. I've seen better testing on CS student projects thrown together the night befor the due date. They don't just miss corner cases. The software is frequently released with blatant top level UI bugs, or with obvious boundary cases never tried. To the point that calling the B&R '10 commercial software is nearly criminal. It would almost be better if you paid a homeless person in beer to test it.
Hello Brian, Thomas and Mike,
Thank you for your feedback.
I apologize for the inconvenience, I can image how frustrating this is in a disaster recovery situation. Please rest assured that our Management team will see your feedback and take the appropriate action.
If you need additional assistance or have any other questions please let me know.
Thank you.
I would like to see the option of cloning Backup Policies.
Allow use of Clean up archive when there is insufficient space while backing up on mounted storage/vaults.
The storage node is a great way to store backups, but retention rules that can bee used to limits archive size are very limited, and a major drawback is some cases.
How about this lot?
1) Fix the de-dupe option. I've re-installed 4 times now, and each time, on the first backup, the indexing fails with a message "error occurred while re-packing" and "Image corrupted". I can't trust it, since I tried to restore a failed machine only to find the backup was corrupt. Instils confidence in a commercial backup product, that does.
2) While you're at it, improve the database caching algorithms. There's plenty of memory, CPU time and network bandwidth left on the storage node, but it clogs up on disk I/O for the vault databases. Only being able to process 22MB/minute is a bit pathetic in the days of Terabyte drives. I wonder how they manage it on NAS boxes *far* quicker than this..?
3) Schedule indexing. This may allow more than one machine a week to be archived and indexed. If a backup is about to start, kill the indexing automatically until it's finished.
4) Fix stats updates for the management console. Often the PC to be backed up will show something like 67% complete when the management server still thinks there's 14% complete. It seems to always be 15-30 minutes behind the real world...
5) Stop logging "failed to connect to a machine with addresses...." as a serious error. It's not. People go home. People turn their PCs off. Deal with it. Quietly :)
6) Implement a way to shut down a PC on backup completion if it was started up by WoL. Don't forget checks like if the backup overruns and a user happens to be logged in, have the option to either not shut down or pop up a box to ask if it's OK to shut down. Or a "don't shut down if after 6am" option.
7) Add a way to re-schedule the next backup for a machine. Can't see a way to do this at the moment.
8) Remember credentials. On the management console, I can see the details on the vaults under Vaults / Centralized. But if I go to Storage nodes and click on our only storage node, in the Information tab at the bottom of the screen, I have to click the "Obtain information" link and enter the credentials for the NAS server for each of the vaults before it will show me the same information.
9) Allow me to delete tasks for machines which are either not responding or are switched off without having to delete the machine completely.
That'll do for starters :)
Windows defrag cannot defrag disk_data.ds.0. And after backing up one server and 3 workstations, it had 65,000 fragments. Explorer cannot copy and past large files, so we have to find something like Richcopy or Robocopy to move the file then write it back. As this is a predicable and expected need, it would be a good idea to avoid this problem via software design changes or create a service that would defrag the file. [I don't know if it is possible to allocate a large file extent then write to it.]
Does this amount of fragmentation cause some of the dedup resource consumption? It certainly might be flushing disk drive cache which would then reduce performance.
Availability to remote install from ABR console of Acronis Drive Monitor. It is good tools, it also monitored by ABR console - but there is no option to install it from there.
A Citrix XenServer Agent
Make it possible (on short term) to be able to upload backupped single files over 2 GB, instead of limiting it. Paragon for example does allow it. Only Acronis True Image 2011 doesn't allow it. I receive the following error: SIZE not allowed in ASCII mode.
In the chat-session, at acronis.com, they confirmed it's limited to 2 GB. Why on earth is this? People have fast internet connections nowadays and we should be able to backup and upload as much as we want or need...
It's very unfortunate, because of this, you lost a potential customer...
- Full RDX Support
- Plans for Export Task (So if you are using D2D2D you can split these jobs into 2 task. First Task will create the *.tib files at a SAN or local Backup Machine and the second task will copy them to RDX or Tape Library e.g.)
Dear all,
Thank you for your comments, and suggestion.
I completely share your point of view on all the feedback and requests provided. I have already forwarded them to the Development and Management team, and rest assured your comments will be taken under consideration.
Please don't hesitate to share your concerns and feedback - even negative - with us. We do value your opinion.
Thank you!
Dear all,
Thank you for your comments, and suggestion.
I completely share your point of view on all the feedback and requests provided. I have already forwarded them to the Development and Management team, and rest assured your comments will be taken under consideration.
Please don't hesitate to share your concerns and feedback - even negative - with us. We do value your opinion.
Thank you!
Maybe someone from the Acronis team should also start looking in other forum topics and threads. For example in the Acronis True Image 2011 forum. There are several complaints, ideas and frustrations where no one from staff ever appears to answer them... I believe True Image 2011 is still a product from Acronis, right?
Could be that I am wrong, though.
I agree with you, Michel.
The Wishlist threads are supposed to be moderated by the Development team as well, but I see that they weren't answered, thus Customers are unaware that our Dev team is monitoring them. Currently I'm working on submitting feedback from the True Image Wishlist via our Customer Listening System. Once it's done, I'll post a notification about it in the thread.
We are passing the feedback, but we lack notifying Clients about it, it's our bad. We'll have it fixed.
Thank you for the comment, Michel.
P.S. Please also note that Acronis Forum unfortunately is not a support channel, but a Community, and we cannot guarantee timely response from Acronis representatives. We would appreciate if for emergency cases you could contact our Support team directly.
Thanks. Hopefully it will be put to good use.
Support team couldn't help me. I already contacted them.
I still remember, back in the old days on Wilders Security forums, the support on the forums was excellent.
Hi
I am new to the forum and I need help. I have Acronis 11 home and all I needed was to back up system and data (windows 7), I have only 2 partitions on my computer; OS and data. I chosed to backup my computer with Scheduled incremental back up when I log off. The back up is on an external HDD (500gb). On every occasion, Acronis creates 37 partitions each is 4GB and now my HDD is almost full after only 5 days. What am I doing wrong?
Hi Acronis developers,
My comments are related to ATI2011
I am missing a possibility to backup new files only within a dedicated list of directories, nevertheless there exist modified as well! Background to this enhancement:
I intend to backup my TV-records (win7 media center) by performing a full backup followed by a certain amount of incementals. That's possible of course. BUT sadly TV-records are marked as modified already when watched for some seconds only. They get a new date. The reason for this is (I assume) that mediacenter remembers the last termination of watching that record to be able to continue at this timestamp! That means, all these records just played back for some seconds will be backuped with the incrementals and thus use a lot of diskspace and backup time. I think, it does not make any sence to make a new backup of these records. Only NEW records should be backuped.
When performing a skeduled backup of files via network, the backup often failes, because the WLAN connection is not done when the task starts (after starting the computer from standby). This is of course not an ATI problem, but nevertheless bothersome. Maybe there could be a check, whether the WLAN-connection is established before starting the BA-task? If the connection is not fine ATI should try to restart it, e.g to disable and to restart the network adapter. This could help with Fritz WLAN adapters which do not reconnect sometimes after standby.
ATI2011 prevents automatic standby when a task is running. That's fine. But please also prevent standby caused by user action. I think a standby during running tasks leads to failures in backup. Please do it like mediacenter does, when a TV-record is working!
Hi Hamdi and Nobbi50
Please could you re-post your comments in the home product section, you have posed your listings in the business products section by mistake. The business products are very different to the home products so you might not receive the support you require in this section of the forum.
Please feel free to remove your posts above and repost them in the following forum section:
http://forum.acronis.com/forums/acronis-discussion-forums/acronis-home-…
All the best!
Add option to ABR11 to run a command at the very end of the task rather than (or perhaps as well as) immediately after the backup step. I want to be able to shutdown the computer after the entiore backup task has completed. A (possibly simpler to implement) alterbnative is tp provide an explicit option to shutdown the compuetr when the complete backup task (backup, cataloging, cleanup and validation steps) has finished.
I really need this...
I was trying repair FAT32, but
Recovery Expert can't view my USB Flash Drive.
Hi,
I had asked this for ABR 10 already.
I would like to have daily and weekly incremental backups to disk and then do the monthly full backups to tape. Preferably with a grandfather scheme.
I assume a lot of people have the same requirement..
best regards
Christian
Hello there,
Is there a way for Acronis to deploy a single image to multiple hard disks at the same time? There are other software packages out there which can do it but lack alot of other features which Acronis has.
We have images saved on our computer and connect multiple SATA hard disks which we want to deploy the image to.
At the moment we do one at a time, but it would be great if it could read from one image and write to multiple disks in parallel.
Many thanks
Hi CVC
I would suggest having a look into the Acronis snap deploy product, it sounds like this is the product you might be after. Although it’s designed more for pushing an image out to multiple computers at the same time... might be worth a look.
Hello,
We have used snap deploy for doing this across a network, but would still like the ability to write the image to multiple SATA hard disks. Some computers NIC cards / SATA controllers we use are not supported in snap deploy.
As we sell new computers, it is often the newest components which are not supported as drivers have not been released/tested, so this requirement does come up quite often for us.
We would like a solution which works ALL the time rather than using two different systems for imaging, and being able to image to multiple SATA disks would work ALL the time.
Many thanks.
Good day,
Based on ABR11, I'd love to see the following functionalities included in future:
(1) Moving archives between vaults, especially between vaults on the same storage node, instead of having to export out of 1 first and then import into another. (Preferrably if we can schedule it as well.)
(2) Bulk license management. Currently we can only import licenses in bulk. We cannot delete licenses in bulk nor move licenses to another license server in bulk. It would be great if we can.
I'm new to the Acronis family of B&R products. Please correct me if any of the above mentioned functionalities is already available
I know this is almost a year later though I'd like to add my voice to the request to be able to list the date and time of the last backup instead of how long since it ran. It takes a whole lot more thought to process how long ago something ran than to look at a date and time.
Hi Mick
Just a quick note you let you know the feature you are looking for is already included with the product, what you can do to get access to these details is select “Backup Plans and Tasks” link then right click on any of the views headings and enable the required options such as: Last start time, last finish time, next start time..etc.. I’ve also included a screenshot to explain things a little better, hope it helps :-)
