Target Drive is Running Out of Space...NOT

Check the external disk for errors. It sounds like the free space is being reported incorrectly.

There is an error with the new release of True IMage Home 2010 which incorrectly gives this error. It is a known issue and will be fixed in an upcoming new build. A work around is to perform the backup from the bootable CD which came with the product. If you downloaded the application, make a bootable CD from the utility within the application. Good luck.

Well, here it is more than 7 months later and I just got the same error ("Target drive is running out of space...") using the latest build: Acronis True Image Home 2010 build 7046. The target drive is a recently formatted (I did not use quick format) Samsung 2 TB, USB attached external drive. Windows 7 saw the drive as having 1.86 TB free. I chose to ignore the warning and my backup completed successfully. Afterwards there was 1.81 TB free--hardly what I would call running out of space.

Can someone at Acronis please check the code to see if Acronis TI 2010 can handle drives of 1.5 TB and above.

When issues like this go unresolved for so long with no communication on status, Acronis TI feels more and more like an abandoned product--or one that soon will be.

Hello all,

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response.

GroverH, thanks for your help.

Let me shed some light on the issue.

Indeed, we were informed about such incorrect message and now the issue is under the investigation, most likely it caused by some particular hardware compatibility problems, since Acronis True Image under the Windows operating system works with disks supported by your version of Windows.

We'll continue our investigation and definitely will resolve the issue. If you want to help us, please collect AcronisInfo output and submit a support request.

We are looking forward to hearing back from you at your earliest convenience.

Thank you.

mikeg wrote:

Can someone at Acronis please check the code to see if Acronis TI 2010 can handle drives of 1.5 TB and above.

mikeg - I currently backup to two different 2TB drives. One is connected to my laptop via eSATA port (I use this just for my laptop) the other is a Maxtor 2TB NAS that I use for my other systems (this presents huge space management issues on the unit for me). Both seem to run without issue but the NAS unit is MUCH slower then the eSATA unit (it is no faster than USB2) thus I'm not happy with the NAS unit. I've confirmed with other sources that NAS units don't seem to be good for performance. Because of the poor performance I don't I don't recommend USB or NAS units but they are better than nothing.

If performance is important to you I suggest either using a RAID10 array (for this you need a RAID controller card (these can get expensive, e.g. $200 or much more) and a mother board that will support the controller card) or upgrade to Win7 and use the software RAID1. I'm not sure which versions of Win7 support RAID1 but it is in mine (Win7 x64 Pro and Ultimate). Using Win7 RAID1 support is a cheap solution and I currently have five arrays in one of my tower systems (long story) two are 1TB, one is 1.5TB and two are 2TB. I will not bore you with more details unless it is of interest to you.

Ilya, thanks for letting us know Acronis is still actively working on this issue. I know it's difficult for support and developers to troubleshoot certain issues without lots of detail. I will certainly help by submitting detailed output. Unfortunately, I'm getting ready to leave town, so I'll either find a few minutes to submit the request in the next few hours or (more likely) I'll do it after I return.

jgt1942, thanks for the feedback. So, it seems the "running out of space" warning doesn't happen to all users with > 1TB backup destinations. Glad to hear it's not happening for you. For those who do get the warning, Acronis is investigating various configurations. More than 7 months seems a long time without any breakthrough, but at least we know the issue is still under investigation.

Backup speed is not a problem for me. Once I bypass the warning, backups finish in a reasonable amount of time. RAID-10 for home is a little expensive for my budget, but I do run hardware RAID-1 on my internal system and data volumes (using integrated Intel 3400 series controller). BTW, my system volume is Intel X25-M G2 solid state. It will beat any spinning platter-based storage when it comes to small random reads/writes (by far the most common type of I/O on a system drive). For backups, JBOD and USB 2.0 are sufficient for me. If I lose a backup drive, I'll just replace it and run backups again. For long-term archiving, I copy to multiple local/remote locations depending on size.

Just curious, are you running Gigabit Ethernet over Cat6 between your NAS and the hosts being backed up? Also, are your network cards set to explicit speed or auto-negotiate?

mikeg - I know Acronis has been slow to respond to various issues but as we all know sometimes finding a solution takes a LONG time but this does not excuse the lack of response by Acronis to at least let users know they are working on the issue.

I've just completed a system rebuild (Win7 x64 Ultimate) on my Lenovo ThinkPad W700 and will soon run additional test. I've had problems restoring a complete drive and cloning a drive. I think some of this is related to some unique things that Lenovo is doing on the ThinkPad (formerly the IBM ThinkPad).

Last night I ran TI B7046 on my new build using my eSATA drive and it ran in less than 20 minutes. The TIB file is 141GB in size. I also setup a schedule task to run incremental BU nightly and a full after 5 incremental runs.

I agree that RAID10 is overkill for backup and as you do, I run my TI BU to a non-RAID drives for all of my systems. In my main tower (Win7 Ultimate x64) is where I have all of my software RAID1 arrays. When I built my last system I was going to install a 3ware 9650SE 8 port controller but too late I discovered that the MB would not support the card. Possibly I will be building a new system in the near future and for sure the MB will support the 9650SE. I was going to use RAID10 for my data stuff (code, music, pictures, education stuff and a bunch of other stuff I download from newsgroups - currently this is all on my RAID1 arrays) and the RAID10 would allow me to add drives after the array was up an running without moving the data off and rebuilding the array.

Here is where I also entered a mental dilemma - my first thought was to use 3.5 inch 2TB drives but heat is a major concern. My current tower has 12 3.5 inch drives in it. I also have 4-120mm fans to keep everything cool. Normally the drives run in the high 80's or low 90's. I use Hard Disk Sentinal (see http://www.hdsentinel.com/) to monitor my drive health and temp) thus I'm not overly concerned about drive failure in that it gives me very early warning.

My current thought is to switch to 2.5 inch 1TB drives. This is a lot more expensive (today I can get the drives for about $110 but for this price I can get a 3.5 inch 2TB drive) but the main advantage is much less power, MUCH less heat, lower drive temp, and longer drive life. Here I was thinking of the16 or 24 port 3ware card but the price (like ouch)! Another option is to use non-RAID 8 port controller cards (about $125 each) but now I'm back to RAID1 arrays and some of my root folders (like my Audiobooks) are greater than 1TB thus I must spread the folder over multiple drives.

I'm trying to avoid external drives because I cannot easily monitor the drive health.

When I built my house three years ago I wanted to install Cat6 but I could not find it in a combo cable which meant that I would have to install the cable myself and with everything going on I just did not have the time. The local labor did not understand that any stretching of a Cat6 cable means that it is no longer capable of GB speeds thus I opted for the combo cable with the Cat5. The 10/100 is all auto-negotiate.

jgt, that's an impressive infrastructure you've got there!

BTW, Acronis support: a customer (Robert Vaughan) found the cause for "Target Drive is Running Out of Space" and posted the solution back in February 2010: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/5844#comment-18746. 

Basically, Acronis set TI backup options Free Space Threshold to 50TB by default thus making every consumer hard drive ever made low on free space before it left the factory! :)