Acronis True Image 2021 Standard - File Recovery Problem
Hi,
Recently installed ATI 2021 Standard on my Dell desktop running Windows 10 Pro 1909. Seems to be OK backing up both disk images and files/folders as per my longstanding overnight backup tasks.
Created new Rescue Media as per the Acronis MVP Forum on USB thumbdrive (WinPE). (Overwrote the same rescue media created a year or so ago for ATI 2019. Probably a mistake as I had tested it successfully at the time and hadn't needed it since.) Anyway, the new rescue media ISO created OK and was written to the thumbdrive with no problems (very smooth script!). Next, to test the new rescue media: booted to the thumbdrive successfully and opened the ATI 2021 version there.
From the main menu, selected Disk Recovery, then File Backups. There was a just one button: "Browse for backups". Clicked this button and browsed to find, and select, last night's disk image backup. Then found I couldn't do anything with it. In the end, I had to X out of this window and go back to the Disk Recovery screen. (So, not sure what the "Browse for backups" button is supposed to be for.) Then I discovered that I could click on "Disk Recovery - Recover your computer from a backup". This opened up "Recovery Wizard" with "Archive Selection" where I could browse again for last night's disk image backup. Pressed Next to open up the next wizard step: "Recovery Method". Selected "Recover chosen files and folders" and pressed Next again. "Location Selection": selected "Recover Backup data to - New location". Next. "Destination" dialog: Selected This PC, C:\Documents. Next.
(My Dell has two internal drives: OS (C:) - a 512 GB SSD, and DATA (D:) - a 1 TB HDD. These are the Windows drive letters. The ATI drive letters are reversed, so C: is the DATA drive, and D: is the OS. Hence the "Destination" selected was "C:\Documents.)
The next wizard step was "What to recover": I selected two small .txt files from a subfolder down in my DATA drive as test subjects. Next. Then Finish or Proceed. After less than a second, got the message: "Recover operation succeeded".
Now, after that long preamble, we get to the actual problem. I opened the Explorer application in the thumbdrive and browsed to C:\Documents to verify that the files were recovered intact. I could find no sign of either one, not only in C:\Documents but anywhere on either internal drive at all.
Booted back into Windows to ensure that I was looking at the right drive (now D:\Documents) and to do more extensive searching. I have repeated the recovery from the thumbdrive a couple of times now and, although ATI still says that the recovery succeeded, I am certain that the "recovered" files are nowhere on either internal drive (even checked the two connected external drives where the backups are written to, and the thumbdrive itself). All I found were the two original files in D: drive that went into the image backup in the first place.
So ... where did the recovered files go? Were they even recovered at all (despite the "succeeded" message)? Have I done something wrong in the above steps? Is the Rescue Media created faulty?
Any help and advice would be appreciated.
Regards,
Pete.
Pete,
I tested file recovery from a full disk backup using both the Acronis created WinPE and MVP media. Both worked exactly the same.
The files are being recovered. The path to the recovered files was different when recovering from tib or tibx backups. When a tibx backup was used, the files went to the proper folder in the drive selected. When a tib backup was used, the folder structure was lost and the files were recovered to the root of the drive selected. If the recover to releative path checkbox was checked and a tib backup was used, the folder structure was maintained and the files were recovered to a folder named DriveH where H was the drive letter of the selected drive.
If your backup was a tib file, you should check the root of the drive you selected for recovery. The files should be there. It may be best for you to check the relative path checkbox during recovery.
Steve Smith wrote:Pete, there are several points in your post above to be addressed.
First, your older ATI 2019 rescue media would not have worked with the new .tibx files that are created by ATI 2020 & 2021, so you would have needed to create new rescue media.
Yes, I just meant keeping the ATI 2019 rescue media until the ATI 2021 media was successfully tested. All my backup tasks are longstanding and are all in .tib format, so the old media should still have worked (as I understand it).
Next, when selecting a backup image file in the Recovery panel, after selecting it, you need to right-click on the selected file which will then show a small menu with further options to allow you to proceed further, i.e. Validate or Recover.
It never occurred to me to right-click the selected file - I don't recall seeing that mentioned anywhere in the documentation. Maybe it defaulted to Validate and hence did not Recover at all? I will rerun the test and check this out!
Drive letters when in the rescue media are very often changed from how they appear when in Windows, so the best advice is to use clear labels for all your partitions / drives, so that you are not relying only on the drive letters. This makes the task of identifying the correct drives so much easier!
Sounds like good advice. My two internal drives are labelled OS and DATA, but maybe more is needed.
When recovering files / folders, I would recommend restoring these to a temporary location rather than to the original one, as this avoids overwriting something that you may not have wanted to overwrite, but also makes it easier to compare the restored files / folders with the originals.
I "recovered" my test files to D:\Documents (Windows drive letter) with the intention of deleting them when recovery was verified. The original test files (before being backed up) were in a different folder. This is good advice, but was not a factor in this case. The filenames were unique to the original folder.
Also, for file / folder recovery, you would probably find it much easier to just double-click on the .tib / .tibx file in Explorer, then locate the items to recover and use Copy & Paste for this, all from within Windows.
This is, in fact, what I would normally do if I was just recovering (say) an accidentally deleted file. However, the objective here was to test the new rescue media.
As to where your recovered files went to is difficult to give a precise answer to?
When you booted from the rescue media, did you do a shutdown then boot from USB, or did you do a restart to do this?
If you did a shutdown, then it is possible that you also have Windows Fast Start enabled and your boot from the USB media was actually done while the system was in a hybrid sleep state (akin to hibernation) where any changes to the filesystem / MFT are lost when the system resumes from that state! This has been known to cause whole backup image files to 'disappear' and the space be 'lost' from the drive because the MFT doesn't know where the file created were stored because was restored from the hibernation state.
MFT = Master File Table that tracks all files / folders in the system.This sound interesting. I think that I did both a shutdown and a restart at various times while testing. Normally I would do a restart, but I had difficulty removing the rescue media thumbdrive while the system was running (apparently a known problem with ATI 2021?), so I did at least one shutdown to ensure that power was off when I removed the thumbdrive. I will look into this further and run some more tests. And report back here with the results and any further observations.
Steve, thank you for your quick and detailed response.
Regards,
Pete.
Mustang wrote:When a tib backup was used, the folder structure was lost and the files were recovered to the root of the drive selected. If the recover to releative path checkbox was checked and a tib backup was used, the folder structure was maintained and the files were recovered to a folder named DriveH where H was the drive letter of the selected drive.If your backup was a tib file, you should check the root of the drive you selected for recovery. The files should be there. It may be best for you to check the relative path checkbox during recovery.
I am not sure I understand all of this, especially the reason for this apparently strange behaviour. Is this explained in any Acronis documentation, and if so can you please provide a link (or links)? In any case, all my backups are in .tib format (the associated tasks being created in ATI 2019 and carried forward). I have checked in the root of my destination drive (and in fact of ALL my drives) and have not found any trace of the recovered files. Nor any folders in the DriveX format.
Anyway, I will continue testing, keeping in mind your and Steve Smith's responses. I will post any developments in due course.
Meanwhile, thanks Mustang for your response.
Regards,
Pete.
There is no documentation about this. It is a failure of the new versions of TI to deal with file recovery from tib backups properly. The new tibx format has certainly introduce a lot of problems. I just experimented with it and saw what happened. I recovered to a drive letter that was empty and had no folders. That's how I saw where the recovered files were going.
I have done some more testing using the ATI MVP rescue media, following the advice offered above in this thread (thank you). After one failure I have had some good results. But solving one problem has flagged three others - but more of that anon. First I would like to detail the steps I took in the latest tests - if you can see any flaws, or a better way I could have/should have proceeded, please comment.
1. First of all, I did a RESTART instead of a SHUTDOWN before booting to the rescue media thumbdrive (as advised above). This may have been key.
2. After booting and getting to the Acronis MVP Forum logo, I clicked on the ATI icon at the right end of the Task Bar. This opened an ATI window that was very small - had to maximize the window to see everything (despite the tiny font size - I have a UHD (4K) monitor, but couldn't find a way to improve the resolution such that I didn't have to use a magnifying glass to read the text in the window).
3. I selected "Recovery" from the navigation panel at the left. This opened a new window. I think it was this window that had two buttons - one for "Disk image", the other for "File/Folder" (forgot to include this in my notes). This window also had a button labelled "Browse for backup" which I clicked. This presented a list of backup versions for one of the three different backups I maintain on the external HD (6 TB). Selecting and clicking on any one of these did nothing. Nor did double clicking, nor right-clicking (no "Recover" or "Verify" option appeared as suggested in a preceding post, but this might not be the place that was referred to). All in all, this list and the "Browse for backup" button which got me here seem to do nothing. What am I missing/doing wrong ??
4. Cancelled out to get back to the "Recovery" window. The text in the window "Disk Recovery - Recover your component from a backup" turned out to be a link (only found out when I hovered over it). Clicking that link opened a wizard with the the following steps:
5. "Archive Selection": Selected which backup to recover. Only one of the three backups chains on this EHD was offered - this was System image (both C: and D: drives in Windows). The other two backups are file/folder backups, neither was selectable. Again, why not (I had already selected File/Folder as the type of recovery, so all three should have been offered for selection? However, one of these is a non-stop backup, so maybe the rules for that are different - if so, what are they?)
6. "Recovery Method": Set to recover chosen files/folder.
7. "Location Selection": Selected "New location" and left "Recover absolute path" unchecked.
8. "Destination": Set to "C:\Documents" (which is "D:\Documents" in Windows).
9. "What to Recover": "Everything" was checked by default - unchecked this and drilled down to select the test files to recover (two simple text files in the same folder).
10. "Summary": This summarized what I had entered, which looked OK. Clicked the "Proceed" button. On the first attempt the ATI program just closed with no message and with no files recovered. I must have done something wrong, because I went through the whole process again and this time, got a message "Recover operation succeeded".
11. I opened explorer from the rescue media task bar and checked "C:\Documents" - the test files were there! Hooray! Repeated the process once more to be sure the successful recovery wasn't a fluke - it wasn't.
There are still three unanswered questions:
1. Why were the two file/folder backup schemes not offered for recovering a couple of files?
ACTUALLY, a plausible and logical answer has just occurred to me: If I am booting from rescue media (for real, not just a test), it would be assumed that my PC is down due to a corrupted or damaged system disk drive, and I want to recover a recent image to the system drive(s) or to a replacement disk. So Acronis has not made simple file/folder schemes available for selection. I think that this must be the answer - do you agree?
2. While testing, I noted that the nonstop backup had stopped! On investigation I found that the Windows drive letter for the nonstop task had changed!. (All my ATI backups are on my 6 TB EHD - drive F:.) While the other two tasks are still working on drive F:, for some reason the nonstop task had changed to drive I: (unsolicited) - I don't even have a drive I: !! What is more, ATI won't let me change it back to F:. It looks as though I will have to delete all the current nonstop versions, delete the backup task, and create a new nonstop task on F: drive and hope it stays there this time. One possible factor - while investigating my rescue media problem, I found out about the existence of Acronis Survival Kit and installed it on drive F: (haven't had a chance to test it yet). Probably shouldn't have done this until after the rescue media issue was resolved, but even so, I don't see why this would change the nonstop task (unsolicited) to a non-existent drive.
3. I included Universal Restore in the rescue media ISO, but I can't see how to invoke it when booted to the rescue media. Or does it appear automatically if you are attempting to restore a disk image to a new (blank) disk?
Sorry for such a long-winded post, but I wanted to provide as much detail as possible about how I have tried to test the rescue media. Maybe restarting instead of shutting down before booting to the rescue media was the answer. Is that documented by Acronis anywhere? With every file selection, I tried right-clicking to see if I could get the Recover/Verify option. I either got nothing, or just the usual Copy/Paste/7-Zip, etc. options.
I would be interested to see any further comments/advice/answers to the above.
Thanks in advance,
Pete.
Pegleg Pete wrote:3. I included Universal Restore in the rescue media ISO, but I can't see how to invoke it when booted to the rescue media. Or does it appear automatically if you are attempting to restore a disk image to a new (blank) disk?
These days Universal Restore is rarely need when you have a Windows 10 OS. It is invoked only when the following conditions are satisfied:
- You have done a disks and partitions recovery on a disk that contains the OS
- ATI determines that you have recovered to different hardware and that necessary drivers are not present (in most cases the WinPE or WinRE would have necessary drivers, sometimes on generic but enough to get the system up and running.
I have not looked closely enough at recovery using recovery media with ATI 2021 to offer any informed comments on your exhaustive description of the process you undertook.
Ian
IanL-S,
Thank you for answering my question re Universal Restore.
Pete.
Just to round out this thread, I have spent much of the past few days trying different things and repeating tests. The best that I can report is that Rescue Media (and Survival Kit which I have also installed) ATI program successfully recovers selected files to the specified folder some of the time (less than 50% in my experience). After each attempted recovery, I used either Rescue Media Explorer or (in the case of Survival Kit tests) Windows File Explorer. Sometimes I found the recovered files in the designated destination folder, but mostly not. In Windows I did a search of all my storage for the missing recovered files using the Everything app - on two occasions I found one of the "recovered" files in Windows folder C:\users\<username>\appdata\temp (which I am assuming is where the files are initially recovered to, before being moved to the designated destination folder - for some reason that final step failed). But there was no sign of any of the other "recovered" files.
Of course I was unable to test disk image recovery (which is what rescue media is mostly designed for). I have only one PC and I am not willing to risk its integrity by commiting to a disk image recovery unnecessarily (for test purposes), especially if disk image recovery is as flaky as file recovery. However, I was successfully able to select files to recover from other archives (how to do that wasn't clear when I first started testing - only persevering and trying different methods got this to work).
I have to say that Rescue Media ATI is one of the most unintuitive and user-unfriendly applications I have used (at least that is my opinion - others may differ).
Fortunately I am a "belt and braces" man, so I duplicate all my backups using two different products - these days ATI is my secondary backup product. My primary product is so much easier to use (even its Rescue Media). The main reason I have persevered with ATI is its Non-Stop Backup option which I use to keep continual backups of one folder that is important to me and which I constantly update. In the past, when non-stop also wasn't very reliable, I have had to simulate it by making hourly backups throughout the day using a different product; but NSB is excellent when it works. Unfortunately it also has stopped working again. It seems that when I installed the Survival Kit a few days ago, the process changed the archive drive letter in the NSB task from F: (where all my ATI backups are stored) to drive I: which does not exist on my PC, and it won't let me change it back - I will have to delete the NSB task and recreate it to get it working again (hopefully). On the plus side, I have not been able to work on my project because I have spent every spare moment trying to sort out this mess. But I am giving it up now, no more testing (unless something changes in a positive way), and will only use ATI Rescue Media as a last resort.
Thanks to everyone who has tried to help. Sorry for venting a little in this last post.
Best regards,
Pete.
Just in case
Using a SHIFT-SHUTDOWN from the START menu/button is supposed to initiate a full shutdown rather than a fast shutdown
Howard,
Thank you for that information.