Default "Where to recover" selections not being made
I have been noticing an issue recently that I wanted to post here just in case there is any "known issue" element to it. There is still plenty of additional tests I need to do as I have time, so if it doesn't seem like a known issue, we can wait until I have more information.
I'm making a full disk backup (MBR and all volumes) to a local external USB drive using the Acronis Backup 11.7 bootable media, using "Manage this machine locally" to just interactively perform the backup. The machine is a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 running Windows 10 x64 in Secure Boot configuration (GPT partitioning, UEFI partition present, etc.)
The issue is when I go to restore the backup, which is also done using the Acronis Backup 11.7 bootable media using "Manage this machine locally". After I select the backup I want to restore, and select the "MBR" as well as all the partitions in the backup, once Acronis Backup returns to the "Recover" screen, the default "Where to recover" selections are all "needing attention" as though an automatic selection could not be made.
There are three disks present on the machine at the time this occurs: Bootable USB flash drive containing Acronis Backup 11.7 bootable media, the external USB hard drive containing the backups, and the blank internal SSD of the Surface Pro 4 machine. ("Blank" == diskpart, select disk 0, clean. i.e. no partitioning of any kind already present on the SSD drive.)
What I'm expecting, and what DOES HAPPEN if I choose to restore a different backup instead of the ones this issue occurs with, is that Acronis Backup's "Where to recover" defaults to the blank drive for all items (both MBR and volumes), and defaults to creating the same partitions of the same size (since this is the same SSD they were backed up from), and the only "selection" I really have to make is regarding whether to leave MBR recovery as "automatic" or "Recover from backup".
This seems to have started happening with my latest backups, because if I select an older backup (using the current 11.7 Build 5554 boot media) I get the expected behavior of automatically re-creating the partitions that were in the backup. But that still leaves multiple variables in play, because "older backup" means both "backups created with an older build of Acronis Backup bootable media" and also "backups of an older build of Windows 10".
Meaning the backups that "restore as easily as expected" were of Windows 10 x64 1511 (build 10586) and Windows 10 x64 1507 (build 10240) (both in multiple editions; Enterprise, LTSB, Professional, and all in Secure Boot mode), and were created using some unknown older build of Acronis Backup 11.7 bootable media. The backups that "fail to automatically choose correct Where To Recover defaults" are of more recent Windows 10 x64 1607 (build 14393) editions (still in Secure Boot mode), and were made using Acronis Backup 11.7 bootable media build 44421.
My workaround to this issue is that when I'm selecting which backup to restore, I simply switch to "disks" instead of "volumes" view, and select to restore the entire disk instead of selecting all the MBR and volume entries. On the same backups where the "Where to recover" won't default correctly if I used the "volumes" view, it will default correctly and restore successfully if I used the "disks" view.
I do always need the entire disk restored 100% of the time anyway, and it's still the same SSD so I don't need to resize any partitions, so this isn't any kind of critical proiblem for me at the moment and the workaround suits me just fine. I guess I'm just seeing whether this is an issue Acronis knows about, or what other known variables might be causing what I'm seeing, in case we need a bug entered on it.
-Alan
