Restore is failing me when I need it most.
My Windows 10 will absolutely not start. I get a blue screen every time. I have tried any Diagnostics that I can think of all with no luck.
No problem, I have a nightly full backup using acronis Sol restoring that should solve the problem, right?
The problem is that acronis is failing me. I boot to the recovery CD and go through the process to restore the entire desk. Acronis tells me that it is complete, yes it does not seem like it has done anything.
When it begins to restore it tells me that it is going to take a while, over an hour. However after that timer is there the recovery generally ends within a couple of minutes and tells me that it is complete.
That being the case I reboot to my hard drive and have the same Windows error.
Here is what I have been doing. I am selecting for Recovery the most recent incremental backup which is last night's backup.. I then choose to recover the whole desk and at that point choose disc one as the item to recover. Disc one has a number of partitions which have all been there from the start as far as I know.
I then select disk one as the destination of the restore and push the proceed button.
When the operation progress window appears it seems to be already on step four of six. I do not see it going through 1 through 3 at all.. it also tells me that the time left is 1 hour and 39 minutes.
It then tells me to restart the computer which I do.
I then reboots a PC and get the same recovery blue screen that I had before.
Any suggestions to what I might be doing wrong?
Thanks Steve. Appreciate the help. Unfortunately, although the full restore worked, the Windows 10 problem that caused the issue in the first place was restored along with everything else! I am now working on restoring files and folders after a full Windows reinstall.
Rich
Rich, sorry to hear that the restore also brought back the Windows 10 issue here, hope the further restore of your files and folders goes successfully.
Richard, what is your backup scheme and what is your retention scheme of those backups? Unfortunately, if the OS or data has issues and the system gets backed up in that state, then the recovery will be the same. You may want to do a backup with more recovery options, such as a daily backup with the incremental scheme (1 full + 6 incrementals) and keep 3 or 4 versions so that you have some options to recover from (up to about a months worth). It really depends on how much data you're backing up and how much space you have to hold the backups though. That said, a 6TB drive is about $100 if it's in your budget and would likely allow for more storage to retain backups for a longer period of time.
Hi Bobbo, Thank you for the suggestions. Much like you advised, I do run a full/incremental scheme with 13 increments per full. I put it onto a WD 4TB external drive which seems to be enough for my purposes.
Looking back, I should have just restored a full version that was a week old or so and that would have probably worked. However, I did not think to do that at the time.
I was also having a problem with my Acronis backup in that, after I did a full reinstall of Windows 10, the files were somehow locked and I had to manually try to change the security setting to allow me "ownership" of the files. This got old quick as I have thousands and thousands of files (mostly pictures) to restore.
What I ended up doing, an I am nervous about admitting it on this forum, is that I went with my double-secret emergency backup at Carbonite.com. The restore from Carbonite has it's own issues but at least it is restoring my files with the proper ownership rights for all of my family users.
The problem with Carbonite, an it's a MAJOR annoyance, is that the restore is throttled to about 2MB/s which is dreadfully slow. My 365GB restore has already been running for almost a week and will take another three days to finish. That is unacceptable and an issue that I have taken up with them.
Anyway, I've learned a few lessons from this and will make some changes to my scheme. I think I will do a file/folder backup so that it will be easier to restore with the proper file rights. It won't be as easy as a full drive backup but it should be easier in another restore scenario should one arise. Hopefully I'll never have to do a full restore again!
Absolutely no issues having multiple backup options! I myself have a few of my own!
Yeah, if you went back a little further, you might have been able to restore to a point in time without the without the windows issue.
If you just need to get/files folders, there is an option for that in a partition/disk backup too. Or, you can mount the backup in the application (if Windows is running) and copy and paste out of it.
There is also an option when recovering just files/folder (out of your disk backup or a files/folder backup) to restore without the original permissions. When you restore them to the new location, they will automatically inherit the permissions of the restore location. Sometimes, it's easier to recover to a different folder (say an external drive) where there are no permissions. And then, cut and paste them into your profile (my documents) where they will get the permissions once they are copied in.
Thanks for clarifying. I guess I do/did not know Acronis well enough to do all of that until I did the full Windows install and Carbonite backup. Lesson learned. Did not realize I could restore to a temporary spot with a full disk backup and not have the permissions travel with the files. A local restore sure tops an online restore by a mile.
Now that I have learned how dreadfully slow a Carbonite restore is I am going to shop for a new cloud backup service.
Richard, in my experience, Cloud is generally very slow. Unfortunately, our ISP's usually have much slower upload speeds than download speeds so that makes getting data into the cloud a lot slower. And recovering from Cloud, even with a faster download, is still usually pretty slow too. Personally, I think Cloud is still good as a secondary (or third) recovery option since it is offsite and fairly easy to access and accessible from just about anywhere you have an Internet connection.
However, I believe that local backups should be the go-to for the primary backup and primary restore options. They are waaaaaay faster. For me, I have one local backup to another internal drive and that is where I go to first for all backups and recovery. Should that fail (let's say my entire computer dies from a power outage), then my second backup is to a NAS that lives in a different room in the house, but still pretty fast across my home network.
Should that also fail me (maybe the house catches fire and I lose everything here), then, I have the Cloud to fall back on. Even if it is extremely slow (which it is in my case), better to have a slow recovery option, than none at all.
For reference (and these are not real world times, but relatively close examples). My main OS drive backups up about 100GB. For a full backup:
local internal drive backup to a spinning drive: about 8m 30s
local backup to my home NAS: about 17m
local backup to the Acronis Cloud: I haven't done this one in awhile (I only backup my user profile instead of the full OS to save time). But it would likely take several hours to at least a day.
Recovery times are pretty close to the original backup times for each of them as well.
You can also supplement some data in the cloud using things like Google Drive or OneDrive as another means to have cloud access and recovery options for critical data in your profile.
Thank you for the comments. I do not do a backup to my second drive but I think I will start that. I have room on my second internal hard drive so it's doable. My external backup, which is my primary backup, is to a 4TB external drive which sits right next to my PC.....probably not a good location but certainly easy! :-).
My new plan will probably be something similar to yours:
Primary backup of system/data drive to second internal hard drive. (Primary drive is a 1TB SSD, secondary is a 4TB traditional hard drive). Most of my data, pictures and video are on the primary drive. The secondary drive is critical because it is where I keep over 500GB of digitized family videos - priceless stuff. The secondary drive will still be backed up up to the local external drive and into the cloud (It took forever to get it into the cloud and, should I need to, it will take even longer to restore!)
My external 4TB backup is right next to my PC which is not as good as a NAS in another room but I'll stick with it. It's very small and portable should I have to evacuate the house (I'm in Florida and that happens occasionally when a hurricane is approaching.)
This new system will give my triple backup of my primary drive and double backup of my secondary drive. Just to be sure I might copy all the family videos to a 1TB drive and take it to my dad's place and leave it there as yet another backup to be called up in an emergency.
I appreciate all of the comments, advice and help.
That sounds like a pretty solid plan! At least you'll have some different recovery options to go off of. My wife will kill me if I ever lose our family pictures and videos. I also have one additional 1-to-1 copy of them to another external drive (no backup software included - just in case) that goes in the safe. I just replicate the data on the main drive to this other dedicated drive and put it in the safe. Between the local backup, the NAS backup, the safe version copy and the cloud backup, hopefully I'm covered :) For the cost of a drive these days, vs the cost of my marriage (or life), I decided the $100 for the dedicated drive was a sound investment.