Windows boot delay, wrong remaining time, and drive letters use.
I recently bought and now started to set-up Acronis True Image 2014. I ran already some full backups of all drives and that works well.
Today I started a differential backup and some problems occurred.
1st: When I now boot my PC (Windows 8.1) I have an additional 15 seconds delay before I can login. Or in other words, before the login screen appears it is “locked” for 15 seconds (no response, no mouse indicator). Is this known and is there a solution?
2nd: When the differential backup starts it presents the remaining-time-to-go (counting down). This initially indicated some 3 hours. After a few minutes it indicated “Less then 1 minute”. This indication last until the backup was ready (that took finally some 34 minutes).
The indication of remaining time is wrong. Is this a known error or is there another problem?
Further I have some questions about the backup approach and use of drive letters.
a.: Backups can be made from the Acronis application running from Windows or also booting from Rescue-media-CD with Acronis.
These approaches creates different drive letters. E.g. from Windows I get System, C and D. However from boot-CD I get K, C and E.
When I restore these full backups do I then need to use the same environment I did the backup? Or can I restore the boot-CD version also with Acronis running under Windows, and vice versa?
In case of disaster it might be necessary to use the boot-cd-backup-version to restore from the windows-made-data-file (with different drive letters).
Please enlighten me?
b.: I have bought a USB (external) drive (WD Elements 3TB USB 3.0) to write my backups to. I see that when a backup is ready it points to a drive letter where the backup hat written to. If this is a mandatory drive letter this could cause problems when this (USB) drive letter changes (booting from CD is different then running under Windows!).
Under Windows I can change the (USB) drive letter (when available). When booting from CD I would not know how to do this!
What happens when this drive letter changes. Is this drive still be recognised by Acronis when needed for recovery? Or can the path that Acronis uses be updated?
Thanks for your valuable response. A new user, BertB.
Might add that you should assign a drive letter to your external drive so that Acronis doesn't get confused or is unable to find previous backups when being run from within the Windows environment. Use a drive letter that is at the end of the chain is best, think X,Y,Z.
Thanks for your response. The 15 seconds delay may be peanuts, but my boot time (I have a SSD) was just 25 seconds, a delay of (additional) 15 seconds is then relatively much. But my biggest complain is that the 1st boot screen is present but I cannot login because a lockup of 15 seconds (caused by Acronis True Image 2014).
Your boot delay may be caused by TI loading drivers, not sure but have seen many complaints about the default sync aspect of 2014 which could be at fault in your delay.
1. You can check here to see if anything is schedled at bootup.
http://forum.acronis.com/system/files/schedule-advance-settings.jpg
1a. As part of the process when TrueImage is started, the default setting is for the program to scan all disks for the existence of *.tib backup files.
This scan is un-necessary for most and can be stopped via this setttings.
http://forum.acronis.com/system/files/remove_all_tasks.png
2. Ignore any remaining time indication as it never has or will be accurate.
After the first backup, calculate your own time. The log files will also show the backup time plus in storage folder, look at the start and modified time for actual creation time. Validation will make each backup take longer and longer.
2A. Yes, the letters may differ between backup and restore letter assignment which is why the user SHOULD NEVER USE DRIVE LETTER as the determining factor for where to place the restore. Instead, assign the volume name to each partition or disk being backed up. Also know the characteristics (size, vendor, etc) of the various disks and partitions. If necessary, keep printouts. User mistakes of this type can be prevented with a little advance research.
2B. As advised on preceding posts, assign a high alphabet letter such as x or y or z to the storage disk or location. Doing so prevent TrueImage from erroring based on a wrong letter. If performing backups from the CD, everything is manual anyway so the user just browses to and selects the correct storage disk and folder so no letter requirement is involved.
As a new user, I would suggest you spend some research time getting acquainted with the many help items available.
Note along the left margin the 2014 webhelp and my "Grovers Guides" which is also my signature link 1 below. These next two links can also help to get acquainted.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/54475
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/48295
One frequent mistake by a new user is the wrong selection of a backup scheme. My recommendation is to select a custom backup scheme and include automatic cleanup plus option to "store x number of recent version chains". This selection enable the program to perform automatic deleting of old backup so you avoid getting the storage disk full later and then faced with how to do deletions manually. How to create this type backup scheme is illustrated in Signature link 2 below and illustrations 11-Full or 11-Inc or 11-Dif.
Also signature link 3 has many items of interest to you.
Edit:
To additonally avoid disk delays, change the "check for updates" from enabled to dissabled as this is too frequent disk reads for something where updates are so rare. Update check in upper right corner help options.
GroverH,
Thanks for all advises and help.
Yes I have a scheduled daily backup.
Your advise to remove all tasks confuses me. In the help file it is said "This command removes all backup boxes from the backup list. The removed backups can be returned to the list by using the Browse tool."
This means to me also I have then no overview anymore (other than Windows Explorer) about past backups. It probably also removes the scheduled backups that are then not run anymore! I want/need to keep an overview of my (one-and-only) active-scheduled backup and the ones I ran once (inactive and not automatically scheduled). My backup list is cleaned manually in deleting the ones I do not need anymore. Please explain your advise a bit more about the consequences of "removing all backup boxes".
I did setup my differential and daily backup already as you indicated; custom and with cleaning and deleting version chains (every 13 days). Also a full version is created after every 6 differential versions. Also my backup drive has a high letter.
So far I think I am on track using a correct method and schedule.
GroverH,
I have a question for you. The default action of Acronis TI on startup is to as you say to scan all disks for .tib files. Is there anyway to change/modify this behavior? For someone like myself whom is running 7 drives in a system even though the majority are SSD's a complete disk subsystem scan is rediculous. I think the program should be modified to either allow scanned disks to default to only those disks where backups have occured. That could be based on the log file or, allow for such scans to be user modified to include only disks that user stores backups.
What is your opinion?
Your advise to remove all tasks confuses me.
Can you tell me where I advised you to do this?
I have several of how you can do tihis but these "how to's" not a recommendation for that to happen.
There can be several instances of where a person would want to use that function such as when the program has filled the task listing with a large listing of backup files. I believe most users know where their backups are stored or know how to find them so a listing of their backups is not really needed.
Bob,
What is your opinion?
It is an option which I do not use and it often causes me unwanted removal time.
I have complaiined about it many time and the option to turn it off was I believe mostly based on my and other compliants.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/31895
When I first install any new build or version, the first thing I to change the setting from enabled to not-enabled.
For the most part, then I am not bothered but every once in blue moon, the Scan will hiccoup and my Main menu will be flooded with a listing of about 50 different backups. As my main menu will have a listing of working tasks, this prevents me from using the bulk removal of all tasks as that would remove both the wanted and the unwanted. Therefore, I have to perform 50 single remove from task options and that is a real pain and a waste of my time.
I know where my backups are stored or I know how to find them so the Scan function is of no benefit to me.
I don't mind it being there as I disable it but it when it hiccoups, then I say a few choice words.:)
Grover
Thank you Grover, you and I are on the same page with that then! Turn Scan OFF! To bad it is not user configuarable, it could be a nice feature if implemented properly.
I agree with Grover. You need to turn scanning off on the first run of TI before it has a chance to scan. In the last version, I turned it off some time after the program was in use. Turning it off had no effect, scanning continued. This latest build I turned it off on first run and it worked. Perhaps one day I'll have time to look at the xml files and see if there is a way to modify them to stop scanning.
I turned it off after allowing it to run. However after removing all backups from the list (pic 1) it hasn't scanned on boot since even though the option is checked in Add Backup (pic2). Search Now (pic 2) doesn't find them either.
Typical Acronis sloppy programming. Build 6673
was,
Might be possible that TI needs to be closed and restarted for such change to take effect. You might try that if you haven't already.
was,
Might be possible that TI needs to be closed and restarted for such change to take effect. You might try that if you haven't already.
Yes, I did try that several times, but atm my list is unpopulated and isn't repopulating on restart or Search Now. Not so much a problem, more a mystery.
I see, that is unusual. No ideas at the moment.
Not a problem - I can add backups to the list if I want to using Browse for Old Backups. I just hadn't expected turning off the scan to be quite so permanent.
was,
You might use Notepad and open the archives.xml file just to see if possibly the missing files are listed inside the xml file to be excluded.