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Multi PC Family - Acronis does not support multi user PCs when some users who are not Administrator

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A summary of my issue is that Acronis Sync will only run for an admin user and therefore the kids PC that I rarely log into never get's synced. I have set up various syncs to keep files from each PC backed up to the NAS or synced between the PCs. I planned to do this separately under each user but since Acronis would not run without me entering the parents account password I tried to set up all the syncs needed under the parents account.

(to make this work of course I had to give the parents account access to all the folders that were under the children's user profiles - but I don't mind this since I'm the parent - if we were students in a house where one was admin and the rest weren't this might be more of an issue).

We have two main PCs in our house. There are two adults and two children - we therefore have three user accounts set up on each PC. Parents and child 1 and child 2. We also have a NAS where each user has a central folder for their files to be backed up. Generally I only log into one PC - the kids move around between both PCs.

However, as was reported as a bug 2 years ago and by various others - the sync only works when the parents are logged in. For the reasons explained above I want Sync to work all the time. I had some ideas about how I might solve this and I had two trial copies of 2013 but my trial ran out so I decided to purchase two copies anyway and expected that I would be able to find a work around....

So far I have tried having Acronis start as a scheduled task (under the parents account credentials) when any user logs in (I configured this in Task Scheduler under System Tools in Accessories). Whilst Acronis loads and runs - it does not sync. I tried both starting TrueImage or TrueImage Loader and in both cases I get an Acronis Icon in the System Tray, and can see the task running in Task Manager if I show tasks from all users. If I start Acronis up (either from start menu or from right click on system tray menu) I have to enter admin password and then I can see that Acronis has got all confused. It does not think the PC is part of the same Sync (presumably because it's a different user logged in) and it has a new default Sync which fails. And I can't join the Sync because the folder is already being synced as part of the sync I set up as Admin User.

I've tried setting up a different folder and adding that to a new Sync by starting Acronis Manager as admin whilst logged in as a child to see if that works - but it still does not meet my requirement of having all syncs running no matter who is logged in.

All in all it seems that Acronis simply does not support running in a multi-user environment when some of the users are not Admins. This is really disappointing for such a mature product. Unless someone can propose an alternative solution I will be seeking a refund under the 30 day rebate and trying another tool (maybe manual Sync Toy Tasks).

Here are some other posts on similar issues

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/34164
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/30707
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/12507
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/27457
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/22997

Some other background and thoughts....

I have Acronis for years and usually upgrade to the latest version - but primarily I only used it for full disk imaging. It works great for this so I had I decided not to upgrade to 2013. However, because I have recently been looking for a way to keep all the data from each user on each PC backed up to the NAS I decided to try it out. I could just use the NAS but people always forget to save to the network, but I've recently found that loads of Apps can't even save to a network share (Picassa, Canon Image software, etc etc) which means that data has to be saved locally first. Acronis looked like it was going to do be the answer to these problems - but it seems not - unless I only want backups to run when I log is as an Admin.

It's pretty poor that so few programs actually support running without Admin rights. In these days where most malware is zero day we need to have more apps running with least privelege. When will acronis start to lead the way?

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Maybe Acronis cannot accomplish its functions without privileges that Microsoft Windows associates only with Admin accounts...
To sync content, I actually use SyncbackSE. It needs to run as a scheduled task with administrator privileges but it can sync content anywhere around the computer provided, I guess, that admins have access rights to the folders. There is a free version and a paid-for version. The main benefit of SyncbackSE is that it allows you to keep versions of deleted files and you can set retention rules of the old versions.

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Contributions: 7
Commentaires: 166

 Hello Adam , hello Pat L,

Adam, thank you for your post.  I will be glad to help you with this problem.

True Image 2013 by Acronis can perform synchronization when logged in under both Administrator or non-Administrator account.

In order to successfully sync your data under a User account (non-Admin), the following has to be fulfilled:

  • True Image 2013 should be installed on a system where the User account is already present. Installation can be performed both when logged in as Admin or User.
  • You should log in to your desired User account and start True Image 2013 with administrative privileges.
  • Create a sync of data that should be synced when this User is logged in.

After that, this sync will only work when the User is logged in.

As you can see in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Acronis\SyncService\Subscriptions, each sync folder is represented as a Sync Subscription. And each Subscription is bounded with the UserSID which is a unique user identifier on this machine and is the basis of the data management security in Windows. Subscription will be active only when user with his particular SID is logged in. Thus, only data of the logged-in user is synced during his session, keeping data of other users untouched. Of course, if you choose to sync other users data from Admin account who has all needed privileges, you will be able to do that, but still only during Admin session.

Let me know if you have additional questions to this topic, I will be glad to answer these.

Thank you.

Thanks - I will try that. Does this also work for Syncs between two computers - can it all be done under one account on Acronis Cloud? Even though there are multiple local users?

Hello there.
I am not sure if you can assist. I was/am trying to do the same thing and habving nothing but problems.
What does not help is cryptic error codes and that fact that the erro code website doesn't find anything!
I have setup a PC for my family to use, with four accounts.
Each account has the same set of "drives" mapped to a NAS for different folders to access specific type of data.
Their permissions are goverened by the user_name and password.
I have also setup an H: drive as their Home Drive to store their own personal documents, etc in.
Each H drive is mapped to different folders on the NAS for each person in the family (ie. Person1's H drive will be mapped to \\NAS\person1 etc).
Each user has their own credentials to each of their home drives and they are all fully working (ie. they can write data to this location with no problems) the administrator account (ie. myself) can also access these locations will full permissions as well. (but I navigate directly via the network!). The idea is that users have Documents, Pictures and Favourites all synced to respective subfolders in their own Home directoy on the NAS.

Anyway.... When setting this up I found so far that only one account works and two other do not... (I am not currently setup as I use another machine as my primary machine... but I intend to get around to it later).

I tried to setup the first account and it failed will all syncs I created. I tried various options to get it to work with no success (ie. do not use mapped drive)...I gave up and then tried another account. This time that account worked!!! So I proceeded to user3 thinking it must be specific to user1, then when trying to do user 3, it failed with the same type of errors.

I am not sure that becuase the names of the Syncs are teh same for each user if this woudl cause a problem or not.

As an FYI. I log into each of their Windows 8 profiles using their credentials. I then load Acronis True Image Home 2013 as an administrator with my account to setup the Acronis Sync backup jobs.....

There error I get is as follows:

Failed to copy changes of synced data from MYKIDSPC to MYKIDSPC: Failed to update sync metadata. Try again later. The sync will be restarted automatically later.

More information about this error and solutions may be available online in the Acronis Knowledge Base.
To access the online resource manually, enter the event code at: http://kb.acronis.com/errorcode/
Event code: 0x019A005A+0x01910026+0x01910037+0x0191003C+0x00000001

Can anyone provide any guidance or assistance?

Thanks in advance.

Neal

NealC,

True Image does not work well with mapped drives due to them being tied to user accounts and the drives are not mapped if the user isn't logged on and a task is scheduled to run. Does your problem go away if you share the folder and use either UNC or IP addressing?

Hi Colin.
thanks for the reply.

I went into all accounts again to check.
I have made sure all use UNC paths.

The interesting thing though last night, out of the three accounts that I setup this time another account worked and the original account that didn't worked now works! (this is confusing).

To make things clear, I am using Syncing. So I am expecting the user to be logged in, making changes to documents etc and then these being updated back to the NAS drive.

Do they update in the background?? I wasn't expecting them to.

Anyway...I can confirm that UNC is definitely being used. I re-created them all again.
Please note that I still have H drive mapped to allow users to save directly to their share under a different directory.
So unless this mapping is causing some interference in some way...I am not sure.

However this time I am getting some different error codes. The latter one may be because that was the user that originally worked and the files were already on the NAS share. Now for some reason it failed to get the details it needed from one of the metadata databases.

Failed to copy changes of synced data from MYKIDSPC to MYKIDSPC : Failed to update sync metadata. Try again later
Event code: 0x019A005A+0x01910026+0x01910037+0x0191003C+0x00000005
Event code: 0x019A005A+0x01910026+0x01910037+0x0191003C+0x00000001

Failed to get difference between two metadata databases
Event code: 0x019A005A+0x0191003F+0x01910037+0x00040011

I will try IP mapping tonight. But not expecting anything to improve..
It is hard to fix an issue when I don't get meaningful errorcodes coming back.

Thanks

Regards
Neal

Neal,

I'm not so sure about Syncing in this regard, somewhere on th eforum a user had a similar problem with Sync and a NAS, but I can't recall the outcome. I'll see if i can find, but it won't be immediately.

Thanks Colin for yuor assistance.
I have created a new topic - http://forum.acronis.com/forum/39019
for my issues instead of continuing with this thread.

Sorry for the long delay in coming back on this. I had a few issues which had arisen from the number of times I had installed and tested Acronis and had to go and delete all my syncs from the Acronis website to clean things up.
So I got Sync working for multiple folders when I was logged in as Admin - this is two different PCs - setting up Local Syncs only (as I don't need/want the Cloud costs) between a folder on each PC and a shared folder on the NAS - yes that's two PCs synching with the same folder on the NAS. I also did this for folders inside my children's profiles. Of course as expected Sync only works when I am logged in.
Next I an trying to follow Dmitry Zelensky's proposals above.:
1) First step was to delete the syncs of my children's folders. Interesting I am getting similar issues to before where the Syncs show as gone on the computer they were set up on, but still exist on the other computer. I realize any Sync you set up is stored in the Cloud so that later you can go and add another PC to it. But deleting Syncs does not seem to work right.
2) So now I have started Acronis as Admin after having logged in as one of my children, and tried to re-create the sync that was running my admin account (the one that is not completely deleted in stage 1). No error messages during the setup saying that the folder is already being synced. BUT

As with the experience of Colin the Sync is failing with Errors about not being able to read the Metadata. Seems like my original view that Acronis does not support multi user - may be correct after all.

NB - the page where I deleted the online Syncs was at https://www.acronis.eu/my/feed/index.html which can be reached from the "Manage Shared Syncs" button. This was where I unlinked the PCs from all Syncs in order to reset everything. Notice that each user/computer combination shows up separately - which is as Dimitry explained it. But it seems that we can't Sync without admin rights.

Also HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Acronis\SyncService\Subscriptions does not exist on my PC

Thanks for your comments Adam. I am in the same position as yourself and trying to do exxactly the same thing. But with No luck.
Looks like I will need to check out SyncBackSE as recommended by Mark S. Although I really don't want to purchase another product for what I expected Acronis True Image to already do! and personally I don't like have lots of programs all doing different things. I like to consolidate utilities etc; as it is easier to manage etc.

Anyway....as I am still persisting I will give it another go and make my other family members admin accounts just to check to see if this makes a difference. However I wanted to share something with you that I thought was interesting.

With troubleshooting...I deleted all Syncs from my family PC. [Done] all good.
After a reboot (in the normal course of using the PC I thought I would delete the files that were copied onto the NAS as part of the sync process).
Previously I got the can't update metadata message etc.

Anyway....when trying to delete the files from the NAS it prevented me from doing so, even though I was using my NAS admin account!

I found out that the .sync files had special permissions applied to them for some reason.

No matter what admin type account I used on the NAS I could not delete them from my PC....interesting...maybe Acronis True Image is having the same issue (hiddent beneath all the cryptic error messages!)....anyway...what I did next was to delete the share from the NAS and re-create it.

My files were gone as and the folder was empty again.....

Next I setup the sync again...no problems on initial setup...and checked to see if I could delete the files on the NAS...and guess what I could easily with no fiddling about..

I am not sure what to make of this...other than it may appear that the permissions on the NAS for True Image files seems to get 'corrupted' and therefore prevent normal operation...

I am going to look into this again to see if I can isolate it any further as well....and let you know.