Making copies of .TIB files to another drive

Mark, welcome to these public User Forums.

The core issue here is that you are trying to add in a copy of an existing Backup file & task that is shown in the ATI 2020 GUI list of Backups.

The way to get around this is to rename the copy of the backup on your USB G: drive, assuming that this is just a single .tib file, then adding this back to the GUI using 'Add existing backup' should be able to complete.

Note: you should not try to do this with the new .tibx files used in ATI 2020 for Disks & Partitions backups, especially if you see a small 12KB .tibx metadata file!

Hi Steve, thank you for your recommendation.

The existing backup is not listed in the ATI GUI list of backups.  I removed it from the list so my thinking is, I have two identical copies of this backup in different locations.  I should be able to add either one in and ATI should not care where it is located.  

I tried renaming the file as you suggested, however it still does not work. 

Thanks again

Mark

Mark,

Unfortunately your issue is result of task configuration.  Backup location on disk is held in a internal database for each backup task.  So in your case that location is D:\ for the backup file created by the task.  When you remove the task from the backup list in the GUI the task is not removed from the database.  So when you add the backup file back into the GUI the old task is restored and the original location remains.

I think the only way to get this to work would be to create a backup with the following Option settings:

• Backup Schedule - Do not schedule
• Backup Scheme - Custom
• Method - Full

The above would create a one off full disk backup of the select drive.  Making a copy of this file and then giving that file a new name would allow you to import the backup into the GUI and should require Reconfiguration allowing you to select its current location.

I am puzzled why you would want to do this, can you explain?

Thank you for the reply.  Your explanation of the behaviour now makes sense to me.

I should of said I have a full disk and partition backup rather than a full PC backup.

I now realize what I was trying to do probably wasn't necessary to begin with since when restoring the partition I'm doing it outside of Windows, after booting up with ATS rescue media, and I'm able to select which ever backup file I want from there. So, I really don't need to have the task in ATS at all.

To explain the purpose of my backup - I have a fresh clean install of Win10 with all drivers, printers, and a few select apps installed. No personal files, pictures, music, etc.  I created a disk "snapshot" of this so anytime I need to re-image the machine to clean it up, it's one step and quick.  I copied that .TIB backup to a second external drive for safekeeping a year ago and when I tried to add it back just last week to check if it was still good is when I led myself down this rabbit hole.   I've decided to just create another disk backup to my external drive.  I re-imaged the machine using the original disk backup, ran some Windows updates, then created two new disk and partition backups, one to drive D: and one to my external.

Mark,

I get your strategy.  I practice something similar myself.  I make Full disk images of clean installs (ususaly 3) and store them on different devices.  These are all one-off backup images.  They can be restored using the recovery media (recommended best practice) at any time.  During clean installs I create these images in stages.  First image is of a bard bones Windows OS only.  Second is that same Windows image with all MS updates applied.  Third stage is after all applications are installed.  All 3 of these images are copied to 3 different devices for archival purposes.  If/when it becomes necessary to install again clean the process is repeated.

Sorry to necro this:

But I have the same question, I have to backup a ton of drives off of different raid controllers, I cannot load raid drivers on the bootable media due to various reasons, so I have to physically load them one by one into a specific windows machine that has that special custom raid driver (with the encryption key) so I can access the drives and be able to clone them into image files.

On the bootable media this is a simple task, Boot the software, select backup to TIB/TIBX file, the process starts, its done, file is a normal file you can copy and move around or load as needed, none of this defcon 5 level of security.

I need this mode of operation but on windows, ATM the process works, the drive and partitions are stored and backed up on the TIBX file, everything shows up fine, but then I cannot move or copy it to another drive, even if I delete it from the UI.

I need to be able to move the files to an external hard drive so I can load them up on the new servers without these custom raid controllers, boot the usb drive version of ATI and load the images to their new SSD drives.

However i'm unable to because the system will not let me move/rename/change the file in any way after creation, if the files weren't so big id format a drive on Fat32 and just middle finger ATIs "security" since they cant lock the files there, but that's not an option.

Any ideas anyone? I'm breaking my head here, why is "create simple no strings attached export backup file" not an option like it is on the boot version... I'm seriously baffled.

I cant believe, "export this file to another offsite backup media" is not a thing, it seems like basic common sense, we backed up hundreds of normal machines using the boot media method without a hitch, if these weren't custom raid drivers that only run on a specific windows machine for security reasons i wouldn't even bother but alas i cant, it HAS to work on windows.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Hmm 

Workaround #1: (Not Ideal)

Save on to Dropbox/GoogleDrive/OneDrive folder, close/kill every acronis EXE file/service/driver, wait several hours to finish uploading it (100gb+ file), once done, reboot computer, go to acronis, hit delete file from UI, say you want to also delete the TIBX file (so it deletes it off the database and "releases" the lock) then once thats done, go to Dropbox/GoogleDrive/OneDrive and hit restore deleted files, wait several hours to download it (100gb+ file), and ta-da? success? yay? but at least the file is now "clean" of any locks, seems to load ok on this and any other machine just fine.

Srsly Acronis... theres gotta be a better way than this.

Alvaro, what version of Acronis are you using here - is it ATI 2020 as per this forum or do you have ATI 2021 or ACPHO?

Acronis Active Protection is the feature that is preventing you from copying your .tib / .tibx files as you are wanting to do, so normally you should be just able to turn AAP off to be able to do this, but with ACPHO, that has become more difficult!

One way that you can do this is to rename the file extension, i.e. change it from .tib / .tibx to be such as .~tib / .~tibx, at which point Acronis / AAP won't care what you do with the file!!!

To be able to rename the file extension, you need to use a program that can be added to the AAP whitelist so that it is permitted to work with and act on Acronis backup files!

It is also best if using this approach to keep the backup to creating 'Single version only' so that you don't end up with multiple version chains that then produce a 12kb .tibx metadata file.

Hi Steve

Thanks for the response, the version is 2021 as for the active protection i have disabled it on the software and then literally disabled all related services, but it still blocks it

and yeah i figured as much to not use incremental files but rather use one off full backup that does make sense, so far its worked it does make one huge file just like the boot one does but its the lock thats the problem

I will try your rename solution that might work, thanks for the suggestion ill let you know how it works

Also in response... yeah i see what you mean about ACPHO, actually i had 2017, when i tried to update it installed the ACPHO, i saw the "mess" that was and said NOPE i had to search the web to find somewhere where someone still sold 2021 licenses, pcworld helped there and was able to get a 2021 license

Im not sure who is doing the ACPHO but they seem to have forgotten what the whole point of Acronis is, its supposed to be a great BACKUP solution, i do not want malware protection or my computer to be taken over by a cyborg hive mind, i have an antivirus/cloud backup for that

OMG Thank you Steve!

Your post gave me the info I needed to figure out how to fix it!

You are correct, its the Acronis Active Protection (AAP) system that causes the files to be locked and be unable to be moved.

At first I thought what am I doing wrong, the protection is disabled on the program settings, but I'm still not able to move the file, seems disabling it in the software is not good enough, you have to disable it on the services menu, and even then its not good enough....

The problem is that if you DISABLE it on the services menu completely, ATI hangs on load and takes a long time to start because its trying to start the protection service on load when it sees it offline, but cant because its set to disable, so you have to set it to MANUAL, however when you do that, ATI starts it every time it starts up, locking the files back up.

The solution was unorthodox but "acceptable" basically you have to set up your services as so on your control panel (RUN=>services.msc)

Disable everything but core and scheduler, and set protection to manual, this is a one off backup machine, so we don't need any additional "helpful" services, if you are in the same boat or you just want Acronis to be what it was back in 2017 before they .. "made it better" or simply to behave similar to the boot recovery version you can go ahead and disable everything except those 3.

Once that's done, reboot your machine, start Acronis as normal, backup your drive as normal, make sure to follow @SteveSmith's Instructions:

• Backup Schedule - Do not schedule
• Backup Scheme - Custom
• Method - Full

ONLY MAKE ONE OFF/FULL BACKUPS, DO NOT USE INCREMENTAL, if you see the 12kb tbix you did it wrong and remake the backup.

Set these options as default so you don't need to do it every time.

Once the backup is done, the AAP (Acronis Active Protection) service will not let you touch the file under any reason, at this point close Acronis and restart the computer/server (This is because you cannot turn it off once its been turned on, unless you restart).

Once restarted the AAP service should be turned off (since its on manual start) and you can go ahead and copy/move/delete the file at your leisure (FINALLY!)

However, (and this is a strong recommendation), considering the new Acronis is like a kraken with tentacles everywhere, i would STRONGLY advise against just moving/renaming the file on the spot, it will probably cause all sorts of issues on the ATI's "spooky hidden magical" database, so my recommendation is copy the file to an external hard drive first before you do anything else, then once its copied, you can rename it or w/e on the external drive, once that's done load acronis back up again and this time delete the backup from the UI telling it to also delete the backup file from the filesystem (and thus deleting it from the magical database).

Once you've done this you can feel free to mount/validate (right click, Acronis True Image => Mount/Validate) the file into a virtual drive(s) on another or the same computer with absolutely no issues, to unmount just right click the drive itself in Windows Explorer and right click, Acronis True Image => Un-Mount (not sure why you cant just do it from the file itself like you can for mounting... seems counter intuitive but oh well)

And there you go, I'm not sure if its an acceptable solution to everyone but it is to me, and its good enough.

I hope others benefit from this.

Super thanks to Steve for pointing us in the right direction.

PS: If you are using ACPHO you are now SOL buddy and just do what I did, roam the internet for an old discounted ATI 2021 license (thank you pcworld!) and just go with that route, uninstall ACPHO and save yourself some mayor hair pulling and aggravation, ACPHO is basically for completely newbie users with no clue what a computer is, for computer savy people is our worst nightmare.

BTW just a heads up it just happened to me, I just tried to move one of the new files and the AAP service just turned itself back on, on its own, from manual to automatic, ill dismiss this as a fluke one off or maybe was accidental, if it becomes a thing, ill find a way to revoke the apps permission to change the status of the start in the registry to FORCED manual..

Again not ideal...just wanted to let everyone know this might be a "thing" and to watch out for it.

Ok I can confirm, every time you start Acronis, AAP will set itself to automatic start, sigh.... now to find a way to block via policy or permissions to prevent it from doing that, seriously guys.... I get most of this was done for "clueless" users but to us powerusers that use this for work is driving us insane.

All we want is a good hard drive backup software... nothing else.. just give us that, its all we ask.

Ill post more as soon as I have a way to disable the automatic re-start of the service

Alvaro, the next version of ACPHO which is currently in Beta testing now allows users to do a selective install of only the core Backup & Recovery + Clone features without installing AAP or Cyber Protection.

The only way to stop the new protection features from being started involves hacking the application by renaming or deleting the executables and removing registry entries - all of which will be undone by any new build installs etc!

Oh thank god... cant wait for that version then.

Not sure who they assigned to do that but thankfully he understands how this is supposed to work.

Also I noticed another SUPER annoying thing, the monitoring-mini.exe & the SQLLite agent, what ever it is, keep reading ALL drives on the entire system, when it finds a TIB or TIBX it tries to read it and automatically add it to the available backups list, while lets put aside the completely unauthorized invasion of privacy issue here, there's another bigger issue, we have well over 100tb of data backups on one of our virtual cloud drives, this is causing the computer to non stop try download ALL THE FILES that are currently on Dropbox with ONLINE ONLY settings, this causes the computer to lock up completely while its downloading the multi gigabyte files, the only way to stop it is to force close Dropbox, then block the running of monitoring-mini.exe via windows execution policy... this is completely broken and unacceptable, apps shouldn't read any files without authorization, much less open them, I hope they also fix this in the new version.

Also I had to Disable the Acronis Agent and Scheduler services as well, this because they were generating an insane amount of log writes, I did some math, at the rate it was going it would burn through the SSDs useful life in less than 6-8 months....  also I checked the logs being written and its mostly this:

{"taskId":1229826361498009600}
27.07.2022 06:26:55.430113 [0x000015b4] [0x000021fc] [debug] [AakoreProxy] : SendRequest()[440] POST /api/task_manager/v2/heartbeats : 200
27.07.2022 06:26:56.437637 [0x000015b4] [0x000021fc] [debug] [AakoreProxy] : SendRequest()[369] POST /api/task_manager/v2/heartbeats

Its a simple heartbeat check, while I do understand the point of keeping logs, there's such a thing as too many logs (or at least too verbose).

This is happy thinking but is there a way to disable logging entirely? Acronis is a software we use sporadically, to do what its supposed to do, backup our hard drives when required, then be out of sight and out of thought until needed again. that amount of logging keeps the disks from "turning off" when not in use and uses up a lot of the disks life.

We like Acronis, we have been using it for decades, the tib format was one of the best no nonsense backup formats ever made, this and that we have our entire company life stored on this format is what mostly keeps us here, but acronis is making it harder and harder to keep using it.

ATM the way it stands we have to literally format and assign an EXCLUSIVE drive to boot Acronis and do our drive backup business on the IT lab machine then shut it down until needed again, in its current state installing Acronis on any kind of production machine would be a definite no-go due to the malware like takeover behaviour it exibits, the machine goes from a user workstation or a server into an acronis borg/cyborg assimilation victim, the machine stops doing the job that it was intended to do and turns into a zombie host for the acronis services, existing only to fulfil their needs first and every other task is secondary, while im sure someone over at acronis thought this was great, its not going over very well over here with our IT staff, but swapping 100tb of backups to another format is a worse nightmare so...

I hope acronis sees the light and separates the backup software from the borg/zerg infestor part of the software.

Were not asking for a lot... just give us the software EXACTLY as it is on the boot recovery USB version of Acronis but on windows, its just a program that gets run and does its job, gets turned off and its out of sight, does nothing else, no scheduled backups, no wierd things just good simple reliable backups, that's all we want.

Thanks again for all the help its been invaluable.

This is what i mean why do we need soooo many logs :/

Link to beta registration: https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/home-office/beta/ for the new ACPHO version.

Thank you Steve! will definitely apply for the beta!

Hi Steve

I Installed the beta version, It is definitely much more improved

For starters:

Less services, that is good:

I'm sad to see some of the invasive backup services are still there, (Nonstop backup service... fitting name), it would be great if they could just make a "Just Simple Backup, No Services" option but that would be wishful thinking, I'm glad they allow not installing the rest of the malware I mean protection suite services, definitely a major plus there.

So In my quest to turn this into a just simple backup solution with no frills attached I proceeded to disable everything except these which I left all on manual same as before:

• Agent Core
• Managed Machine Service Mini
• Scheduler 2
• Tib Mounter service (this one is great btw, minimal logs, zero intrusive, super sleek and low resource use, if you disable everything and just leave this on, mounting and unmounting of tib files works perfectly as a standalone tool, it doesn't mess with any of the other services start permissions etc, I wish I could give kudos to the guy who coded this, definitely can tell its well and above the other guys in coding skill)

Then I deleted the:

• Scheduler2 helper
• Tib mounter monitor
• Acronis tray monitor

From startup/run, since I know from previous experience they are not required and serve basically no function except consuming resources.

After a restart, I double checked the services tab, all services still as I left them, I turned on the Acronis app, and got the expected "hang" I think this is because its trying to find the services I disabled, it times out (gives up) and then tries to "restart" them, once it does that it works ok, after like a minute, a window pops up for a second saying "activating scheduler service" and the app loads perfectly.

Omg beautiful, all services stayed off, the only one that started was the scheduler service, and it auto changed itself back to automatic start,  (seriously guys... let it go, if we set it to manual its for a reason, stop overriding our choices...), ill have to make a scheduled service to change that every hour automatically back to manual, sigh.

Also a good plus, its no longer trying to read every TIB x file on our online cloud drive causing the machine to perma hang, that is definitely a major plus as well, that was essentially turning into a dealbreaker for us, I distract myself and go home forgetting to turn off the backup machine, and come back the next day to our disks full and the app having downloaded 30tbs of files during the night because it thought it would be "fun" to check them all out.

Funny thing, the program is running and the ONLY service that's up is the scheduler.... if this is the only service needed (and I get why) why force the rest of the services to be installed? well anyway I'm glad it works.

So I proceeded to open the hard drive that required a backup, re-set all settings to what you suggested (custom/full backup, etc) and hit BACKUP NOW.

The program is working perfectly fine, all services disabled, all startup exe files deleted and prevented from startup, no issues doing backups, apart from random hangs for around 30-60 seconds (I'm sure something to do with the disabled services) its working great and wow its FAST..... ok no I take that back its ABSURDLY FAST! I just backed up 150,000 files worth of data (80gb) in 6 minutes.. we have never seen anything like this.

Whoops hit save by accident, ill continue here:

File came up to 37gb:

I'm... speechless... I can rename it... change it, move it anywhere I want.... no more locks, even with the program still running in the background! I don't even have to turn it off!... THANK YOU GUYS! I'm so happy! FINALLY!

So I shut the program down, tried to mount the file, mounts perfectly fine, I can read all files, unmount still requires going to the drive and right clicking but its ok, it unmounted just fine.

Now to check log use...

Excelent since all services are offline there is no logs, except for the scheduler, which ofcourse is logging the **** out of the hard drive, for no reason other than just existing and being turned on, but no matter nothing a quick shortcut on the desktop to turn off the scheduler service wont fix.

Ok I made a batch file to simplify this process: To re-set the scheduler service back to manual and turn it off once you are done, just copy this text into a text file, rename it AcrSch2SvcOFF.bat, and run it whenever you are done using acronis to return it to its non invasive state

@ECHO OFF
ECHO Stopping Acronis Scheduler2 Service (to prevent excess log writes to the hard drive)
SC STOP AcrSch2Svc
ECHO .
ECHO Re-Setting the Acronis Scheduler2 Service back to MANUAL START, so it does not autostart on boot.
SC CONFIG AcrSch2Svc START=DEMAND
ECHO DONE!

Steve I want to seriously thank you for all the help, pointing us to this beta version was a god send, aside from the forced install of all the services, the exe start up files and the automatic reset to auto start of the scheduler it is essentially the tool we asked for, just a simple awesome super sleek and fast backup solution with no nonsense and were head over heels with the speed, it is absolutely bonkers! we will get the whole backup job done in days when we had scheduled weeks!!!!(using the usb boot version) bosses will be happy.

I hope this post has helped others looking to simplify Acronis back to its 2017 state and turn it into a lean mean speed backup machine haha.

Now I cant wait until this version is out for sale.

Alvaro, I would recommend posting your comments above into one of the Beta forums where the Acronis developers are more likely to read them.  You should be able to see the Beta forums now you have registered to participate in the Beta programme.

Got it, will do.

Thanks for the tip