Disappointed in Acronis 2020. Problems seen so far. Also a question.
A comment on quality of 2020 and question for experienced users on form
The question: So my question is I also own Acronis 2017 are there any outstanding known issues for 2017 that would prevent me from decision to uninstall 2020 and install 2017 which I own?
Also thankfully I only use Acronis on my local machine as I work from home and I full backup my work machine on my own as it is more efficient than remote backups.
What other backup solutions for home users do experienced users have here that are known to be reliable for simple Full backup (incremental/differential) cycle on one local machine to USB external media.
Strike 1:
I just installed 2020 and first problem I had was my external USB drive. Acronis Rescue disk and Windows 10 had different drive letters for the destination drive. Therefore once in windows I was not able to open my first ever backup with 2020. I search the forums and find solution set target drive of backup so that It has a fixed drive letter. Annoying but not a deal breaker.
Strike 2:
Do a 2nd attempt at back: Once again use rescue media to create backup and this time validate in the rescue environment works fine. Next morning boot to windows 10 and to be paranoid validate backup while in windows 10, Validate stuck at 1 minute to go for a long time...
Strike 3:
Reading regarding the new .tibx format and how chains are validated just because they exist. Each full backup and the associated incremental/differential backups should have nothing to do with previous full backups and their associated incremental/differential backups. The fact that completely separate backup chains are re-validated just because they exist is... well inexplicable to me. I was a developer, QA, System Analyst and Business Analyst, and Project Manager in my IT career for Fortune 500 companies. I am familiar with every step of software development and have done almost every job. ((Is there a reason technical or business use case of re-validating things that have nothing to do with the current chain? (Full back and associated incremental/differential) )). The reason I ask is that the fact this is done is pretty alarming to me. It indicates what is some seriously flawed reasoning at either the product design level, development level or possibly both. (Alarm bells in my head, something is very wrong in concept or execution of concept.)
Strike 4:
Investing further and finding the web backup features via MMS service issue throwing saved backup scheme settings into chaos across multiple versions.
In baseball there is only 3 Strikes. I am at 4 strikes. Ranging from easy avoided, inexplicable and horrific.
Also the UI is horrible when you have to right click on archive to validate in rescue environment. There should be a simple checkbox labeled "Validate after creating backup" Not having to go to options subscreen to do so. Validation is a primary decision when backing up. Needing to google how to Validate archive in Acronis should not be a thing. Also In the PE rescue media there is no "shutdown" that I can clearly see to exit the rescue environment cleanly and even shutdown /s is not supported in the PE rescue image. I had to guess "Maybe if I press my power button it the rescue environment will shutdown nicely..."
If I have mistaken any of these points, apologies. Installing a backup software and having it work fine right away is something I expect...


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Validate stuck at 1 minute to go for a long time...
I don't know if this is universal, but I've seen several times when ATI goes to "1 minute" before starting the validation. Then the entire validation - which can take hours - proceeds with "1 minute" displayed.
This is obviously a bug or design flaw, but I think, in part, ATI just has no way to know how long a .tibx validation will take. (There might be hope in getting a more reasonable time estimate if ATI would validate just a single chain.)
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Patrick,
(There might be hope in getting a more reasonable time estimate if ATI would validate just a single chain.)
I believe it would be better to say that a more reasonable time (estimate or actual) if ATI would validate just a single link in a backup chain.
Charles,
I understand your angst. Given your background, I'm not sure I can offer any pertinent technical reasons that what you experienced exist or not but, I am willing to give it a go.
Strike 1:
I just installed 2020 and first problem I had was my external USB drive. Acronis Rescue disk and Windows 10 had different drive letters for the destination drive.
In a Windows environment removable disk drive letters are assigned randomly by the host environment and such assignment will be in disk initialization order. Therefore, an Windows installation will assign removable media drive letters in a next-in-line sequence of assignment. A WinPE/RE instance of a booted media will work the same way except in this case all drive letters (fixed and removable) are assigned randomly. Therefore it is recommended that users apply unique volume names to their disk drives (fixed or removable) so that identification does not rely solely on drive letter. This will eliminate user confusion of which drive is which. This issue is a result of how letter assignment is handled by Windows and not Acronis True Image.
Strike 2:
Do a 2nd attempt at back: Once again use rescue media to create backup and this time validate in the rescue environment works fine. Next morning boot to windows 10 and to be paranoid validate backup while in windows 10, Validate stuck at 1 minute to go for a long time...
As Patrick mentioned, it is known that the validation counter has issue with staying at 1 minute for long periods. Time Remaining Calculation Counters have notoriously been inaccurate for most all versions of the product and have become well, accepted if you will among most of the user base.
Like Patrick I believe that True Image has no real way of knowing how long processing is going to take as it is not as easily determined, unlike say for an app install for example. To be fair, I have seen this scenario in other apps and Windows as well although there has been improvement in this area in recent years. Is it a bug? Possibly but I would say more of an annoyance than anything else. I would think over time this will improve for True Image but certainly is not something that is at the top of the list for fixing.
Strike 3:
Reading regarding the new .tibx format and how chains are validated just because they exist. Each full backup and the associated incremental/differential backups should have nothing to do with previous full backups and their associated incremental/differential backups. The fact that completely separate backup chains are re-validated just because they exist is... well inexplicable to me.
As I commented to Patrick above it would be best if individual links of a backup chain were validated independently of all other components of the backup chain. I say links here as I am of the opinion that users need to come to an understanding that with the new tibx format of the TI 2020 product, the concept of backup chain has become more acute or defined if you will. In the past a backup chain held a rather loose meaning in that a chain could have sub-chains within itself all part of the backup task chain, ie. full + 5 inc. + full + 5 inc. = 1 chain w/ a sub-chain, and on and on.
Obviously this is no longer true. A backup chain now is defined by the parameters of the backup task configuration. So a task that is designed to have say 14 additional full, inc., or diff. files based on an initial full backup file are a single backup chain. Each additional backup file created by that task adds another link to the chain. Obviously this means that total backed up data could be enormous in this scenario for one user yet may not be for another. The point is that a user must be more conscientious about how much total data a task will create and then create the task with that conclusion weighed against that of desired performance. Achieving that may well require a period of trial and error for the user however, the end result should be worth it.
Strike 4:
Investing further and finding the web backup features via MMS service issue throwing saved backup scheme settings into chaos across multiple versions.
I would agree that this is a Strike. Won't defend it in any way. I will say however that given the rest of my post here, this would have to be Strike 1 rather than Strike 4.
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