Acronis True Image Home 11 (Full Version) failing to recognize encrypted drive
Not off to a good start here, Acronis. I've invested in 2 True Image purchases from you to date, and now that I finally cannot troubleshoot my issue any further, I come to the Acronis site to discover that I cannot even get live chat support? Or even an email address?
Way to raise the bar.
I'll keep this simple. I use True Image for managing partition-level (or entire drive) backups only, and I *DO NOT* (and will not) use the Windows interface. Ever. I exclusively use the "rescue" boot media. (Kudos on the functionality of the bootable software -- great stuff there, when it works.)
This has worked flawlessly for years, until I started encrypting my drives. This latest version of Acronis is now telling me that "my drive contains errors," when I attempt to use the Clone Drive function, when my drive does not in fact contain any errors. What it does contain is encrypted data, and for some reason Acronis is attempting to decipher that data rather than doing its job and just reading it, byte for byte, and copying it to another drive.
How does one go about getting Acronis True Image Home 11 to just read the disk and copy it? All partitions, boot records, the whole deal.
(Incidentally, I visited the Acronis site a couple days ago and very quickly found myself live chat support for a question about a *potential purchase.* Funny how easy that was, huh? The rep assured me that the latest version of True Image (Home 2010 or whatever) would indeed backup my encrypted drives byte for byte. But that's what I was told before I bought my current version, and we see here how well that worked out.)
(I'll also clarify here that my O/S is Windows XP (sp2) -- but this should be entirely irrelevant since the O/S is encrypted, therefore True Image has no idea what it's looking at.)
Thanks for your reply. Do you know if this forum is moderated by Acronis? Or are we on our own here?
From a technical standpoint, I don't understand how encryption is really even an issue. If the software is capable of backing up a drive -- just reading data, byte for byte, and duplicating it elsewhere -- it shouldn't matter what the data is.
And while we're all accustomed at this point to Microsoft-style bloatware that attempts to "help" us at every turn, this is different -- you would actually have to go out of your way to make software like ATI attempt to interpret what it's reading, rather than just duplicate it.
Boggles the mind.
I don't think it's a matter of ATI decrypting the data when it backs up. I think it's a matter of the encryptor using its own driver to address the drives and that not being compatible with the driver ATI uses to address the drives for streaming purposes. My guess is that the encruyptor inserts its own driver in the data path to the disk, so to speak, and ATI tries to insert it's own. The latest version might be able to handle some kinds of encrypted drives but you'll have to check with Acronis or the ATI web page to confirm that.
Acronis usually does have a person that reads the forum and answers posts, but it's a limited amount of reading and response compared to all the other folks on the forum.