New user, many issues with Acronis
I am having quite a few serious problems. After a less than satisfying experience with Acronis Live Chat, I'm turning to this forum for help. (The live chat started with me posting a question, a response saying "... please give me 3-4 minutes to review your issue..." and 3-4 minutes later, a response "How may I help you today." It went downhill from there.
Here are my issues:
I am using a new copy of Acronis 2014, which I updated within the last week. I can't tell you the build number because I'm still in the middle of a restore. I'm on Windows 7. I am backing up to a USB connected external drive, doing incremental backups. Here are the issues:
* When I got on the computer this morning, I got a message that last night's backup had failed due to running out of space. This is very surprising, because when I last checked yesterday it had at least enough space for a full backup, and all I was doing last night was a differential backup. But I haven't checked the USB drive, so let's stipulate for now that it actually did run out of space.
* I rebooted the computer for other reasons, and got a message "Operation in progress, please wait". After googling this issue, it appears that this is an Acronis error that comes up when a reboot was done in the middle of a backup. So this seems to be a bug - it wasn't in the middle of a backup, the last backup had failed.
* I was unable to reboot back to windows, even using safe mode, etc. I can't say for 100% certainty that it was Acronis causing me to fail to boot into Windows,, but it would be quite a coincidence if it wasn't. Either way, the issue above is still a bug - it wasn't in the middle of a restore so it shouldn't be giving me the "operation in progress" message.
* So I decided to just bite the bullet and do a restore from my last backup. I had a full image backup from a week ago, which I can go to if I must, but I preferred to do a restore from the latest differential backup. I first tried to restore from last night's backup. I got a message "This is not the latest backup", or something like that. That wasn't correct - it actually was the latest backup, but I assume it had a problem with last night's backup because it had failed. Either way, the error message was misleading (bug 2).
* I then tried to restore from the differential backup from 2 nights ago. It let me select that backup, but wouldn't let me select the hard drive (it is an unitialized RAID array - I recreated the RAID array before doing the restore). The chat guy explained to me that I have to go into Utilities in acronis and add a partition to the hard drive to do the restore to. This seems odd, when you do a restore from a full backup image, it lets you select an unpartitioned drive, but if you do a restore from a differential backup, it makes you manually create the partition.
* Once I partitioned the drive, and selected the differential backup, it didn't give me an option to select the restore destination. The "Next" button wasn't there - I was stuck in the browse for backup screen (bug 3).
* After a reboot, I was finally able to select the differential backup and restore destination, and start the restore. However, it says that it's doing a "sector by sector" restore. What's up with that? It wasn't a sector by sector backup. Also, I know from experience that a full restore of this image takes 45 minutes. This restore has been running 2 hours, and it's saying it has 8 hours to go.
So I'm not sure what I'll have when the restore is done. Hopefully it works, but I had to jump through way too many hoops to get to this point! Are any/all of these issues known bugs? Any hope for resolution?
Thanks!
- Dave
Ok, so after two hours it said it had 12 hours remaining. Then after 4 hours it said that it had 17 hours remaining. Since at that rate it would ~never~ finish, I gave up and cancelled the restore. I then went and restored a full image backup (created by booting from an Acronis CD) and restored that. That only took about 45 minutes. I am now trying to do a file restore from my differential backup to restore just the files that I can remember I modified in the last week. For some reason, it won't let me select the option to overwrite existing files (should it?) - instead it forced me to create a new restore directory and restore to that.
So my big issue with the restore (along with the other issues mentioned above), is that restores from a differential backup (even the full backup that's the first backup in the differential backup set) insist on doing a "sector by sector" restore, which by all indications would finish sometime long after our sun has gone cold.
Any suggestions (please?)
Thanks.
- Dave
Personally I think those incremental backups are terrible. I've never liked them. I would always rather just continue to clone to a different drive, OR just make a full backup when you need to. The incremental backups to me never seemed to do what they were meant to do. They seem to literally take up a ton of space because little changes in windows are going on you might not even be aware of but Acronis is.
Just my opinion though. I myself have had a weird issue. I used the full BOOT CD of 2014 and I cloned my Win XP 160 gig drive to another 160 gig Velociraptor drive I just got from Ebay. I tried to boot from it and low and behold.....it booted....but...nothing worked. LOL First time ever Acronis failed me in cloning a drive. So...what I did was use the 2010 Edition that was installed on my XP.....Guess what...worked perfectly. You'd think a 4 year old version would work worse, but it didn't...it worked better. As for the Universal Restore function...I'd be in trouble but I won't be swapping mobos for awhile.
Good luck. I wish someone knew why my built in OS Acronis worked better than the Boot up version....that's blowing my mind.
Maybe you're right about the incremental backups, I thought it seemed the appropriate way to do a nightly backup but maybe I'll rethink that. Either way - they should be restorable and they don't seem to be. After not hearing back from Acronis tech support for 24 hours, I've asked for a refund. I'm going to try another product. I'm sorry, but when it comes to backup software, it's one strike and you're out - and I had a lot more than one strike in the short amount of time I've used this. This post/thread may get deleted - but I thank you for your response and good luck in the future with Acronis!