Acronis Cloud - Connection Timeout
Are there any known issues with Acronis Cloud? I've just noticed that my scheduled weekly cloud backup hasn't been completed since the 12th December. I just get an error about "Network disconnected by timeout" (same when manually starting the backup)
I followed the steps in KB Article 62513
Port checker returns all OK with the default baas.acronis.com url - The backup itself was on the Strasbourg datacenter, don't know if that requires a particular url
Open SSL returns... something, I can't really understand the output but there is a certificate chain like linked page describes and not a connection failure.
Another client on the same network was able to back up (to the London datacentre) as recently as last night.
Ok, after a bit more troubleshooting, and an un/re install of the 2021 ATI client...
I was wrong about the Datacenters, the one that fails is stored in Paris (its the older backup that was first seeded before London was an option). The one that works is in London.
Creating a couple of mini cloud backups of a few megabytes each, one in London, one in Paris, I get the same behaviour on this machine - London works, Paris doesn't.
I hope this isn't due to some Brexit Nonsense.
Edit: So apparently there is '24/48 hr server maintenance' going on, would have been nice to know that before troubleshooting my end. Doesn't explain why it hasn't backed up since 12.12.20 but it's possible I didn't give it the chance so I guess I'll give them 48 hrs before complaining again.
I am French and I will try to explain my story to you.
After August 11, 2020, it was impossible to make a backup on a data center located in France. Backups failed with error code "Network disconnected by timeout". Backups to a data center in Germany worked very well.
I opened a ticket to get support from Acronis. It took three support people to deal with the problem, 30 emails exchanged with support, 3 remote sessions on my PC using TeamVierwer. After more than 2 months, Acronis noticed that the certificate to access the data center was not valid.
So Acronis took 10 minutes to correct the problem.
Until December 21 everything was going very well. Alas on December 22nd I installed the last version of TrueImage.
And now impossible to make a backup on the data center in France. On a data center in Germany it's OK. The bug is there again.
I opened a ticket again for support from Acronis, reporting that I had already had the same problem and indicating the previous ticket number. Acronis' response: 'Connect to the live chat'. Following this answer I wonder how Acronis handles bug fixes. At Acronis there is no configuration management or non-regression testing.
In any event, I think Acronis has lost a customer by treating its customers like this.
Regards
Thanks for the info.
I wonder if its possible to migrate to another server on their end. One big reason I've stuck with Acronis, is it takes a long time to seed 1tb of data to the cloud. But if I ever have to do so, it does open up the market to competitors.
Edit, my bad they actually got back to me shortly after my call and gave me instructions to refresh the certificates, but it got sent to spam so I didn't see it until I signed into the support site to start a new chat.
John, it would be good if you could share the instructions about refreshing certificates so that other users can find it if needed.
Hervé Yvinec wrote:I am French and I will try to explain my story to you.
After August 11, 2020, it was impossible to make a backup on a data center located in France. Backups failed with error code "Network disconnected by timeout". Backups to a data center in Germany worked very well.
I opened a ticket to get support from Acronis. It took three support people to deal with the problem, 30 emails exchanged with support, 3 remote sessions on my PC using TeamVierwer. After more than 2 months, Acronis noticed that the certificate to access the data center was not valid.
So Acronis took 10 minutes to correct the problem.
Until December 21 everything was going very well. Alas on December 22nd I installed the last version of TrueImage.
And now impossible to make a backup on the data center in France. On a data center in Germany it's OK. The bug is there again.
I opened a ticket again for support from Acronis, reporting that I had already had the same problem and indicating the previous ticket number. Acronis' response: 'Connect to the live chat'. Following this answer I wonder how Acronis handles bug fixes. At Acronis there is no configuration management or non-regression testing.
In any event, I think Acronis has lost a customer by treating its customers like this.
Regards
Did Acronis really forgot to renew the certificate? Please provide more details!
Steve,
Sure, solution 3:
1. Sign out and sign in to the application and attempt to run the backup.
2. Disable the firewall for a while and attempt to run the backup.
3. Renew Cloud Certificate and run the backup.Steps to renew Cloud Certificate:
- Turn off Active protection in Acronis True Image 2021
- Sign out and close Acronis True Image 2021
- Open task manager
- End all Acronis processes.
- scroll down and End all "com surrogate" processes in task manager
- Click on Start-> type Services.msc and open Services
- Stop all the Acronis Services.
- Navigate to the path and rename the OnlineBackup folder as OnlineBackup_Old:
C:\Program Data\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Note: ProgramData is by default Hidden Folder in C drive
4. If the issue not resolved, please uninstall Acronis True Image completely using clean up utility .
https://kb.acronis.com/aticleanup
I did have some issues following these steps. You can't kill all the Acronis processes while the services are running, because they automatically restart them. And the Cyber Protect and Active Protection services can't be stopped, even by the admin. I had to set their start to manual, then restart before I could truly kill everything and rename the folder.
Unfortunately, it still didn't work for my particular issue. I had to carry out the next suggested solution, which was full removal with the clean-up tool and re-install.
That DID work, sort of. When I signed back in, and it identified the existing cloud backup, it started 'backing up' all 1.1tb which I'm guessing was just some sort of parity check because it did it in just under 10 hours. There was one strange aspect though. The datacenter entry (which is obviously locked for an existing backup) has changed from 'France' to 'United Kingdom' I'm not sure if its a UI bug or if they've actually mirrored the backup on their backend, but creating a simple test backup to France still fails.
I'm glad I'm able to back up again, and I've not had to reseed the entire thing, but I'm not sure Acronis should be unilaterally moving my data out of the EU - If that's even what happened.
John, thanks for sharing the method advised for forcing a renewal of the cloud certificate (which should never be needed to be performed by users if the application was coded correctly to deal with this type of issue!).
There are several alternative methods of achieving the same end result for users who do not want to jump through all the hoops you have described in order to rename the C:\Program Data\Acronis\TrueImageHome\OnlineBackup folder.
You can boot your PC from the Windows PE version of the Acronis Rescue Media and get to a command prompt where the rename can be done.
Perhaps easier (for some), create a Linux Live boot CD or USB stick and boot the PC from this to do the same.
The key caveat for either of the above is that drive letters may be different when in the boot environment, so check that C: is still C: and D: etc.
Note: I would recommend creating the MVP Custom PE Builder version of the Acronis Rescue Media which includes both a Command prompt and a File Explorer application in a WinPE desktop presentation. (Link in my signature).
There was one strange aspect though. The datacenter entry (which is obviously locked for an existing backup) has changed from 'France' to 'United Kingdom' I'm not sure if its a UI bug or if they've actually mirrored the backup on their backend, but creating a simple test backup to France still fails.
That does seem very strange! I have the opposite issue when creating new Cloud backups in that I am in the UK but for some reason my account defaults to the 'France' data centre, so I have to remember to change this to London before running any new backup!
I doubt that Brexit has caused data from UK users to be migrated from EU servers to the UK!
Thanks Steve, I do have a 'rescue' USB stick I created through Acronis a while ago, although I've only had to use it once for a full restore it seemed to do the job.
That said, all my drives are encrypted with Bittlocker so I don't know how straightforward accessing them would be outside the normal boot process.
I did mention the apparent change in the location in my follow up to the ticket, I'll report back if support can provide any illumination on it.
I know a transfer of data was floated as one possible outcome of Brexit by Acronis in 2016 but the fact we've not heard anything more on it since leads me to agree its not what happened here, and its more down to some technical issue, but it's outside my area of expertise.
John, see below for information on using BitLocker with Acronis rescue media:
If you create the 'Simple' version of the ATI 2021 rescue media, and do this on Windows 10 Pro which has BitLocker support, then this is included in the rescue media but there are some steps that are needed in order to access a BitLocker encrypted drive in the rescue environment.
When you boot into the rescue environment, you will see a black Command prompt window along with the main ATI 2021 application window. You need to close the ATI 2021 window in order to have access to the command prompt in the black window.
Now, you can use the BitLocker commands to identify and unlock your encrypted drive before relaunching the ATI 2021 application again using "X:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageHome\trueimage_starter.exe"
See the following data captured from my own system booted from the ATI 2021 Simple rescue media with an encrypted drive connected.
X:\windows\system32>wpeinit
X:\windows\system32>"X:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageHome\trueimage_starter.exe"
Terminate batch job (Y/N)? nX:\windows\system32>manage-bde -status
BitLocker Drive Encryption: Configuration Tool version 10.0.19041
Copyright (C) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.Disk volumes that can be protected with
BitLocker Drive Encryption:
Volume C: [Windows]
[Data Volume]Size: 200.83 GB
BitLocker Version: None
Conversion Status: Fully Decrypted
Percentage Encrypted: 0.0%
Encryption Method: None
Protection Status: Protection Off
Lock Status: Unlocked
Identification Field: None
Automatic Unlock: Disabled
Key Protectors: None FoundVolume D: [SSD-Data]
[Data Volume]Size: 263.29 GB
BitLocker Version: None
Conversion Status: Fully Decrypted
Percentage Encrypted: 0.0%
Encryption Method: None
Protection Status: Protection Off
Lock Status: Unlocked
Identification Field: None
Automatic Unlock: Disabled
Key Protectors: None FoundVolume L: [Label Unknown]
[Data Volume]
Size: Unknown GB
BitLocker Version: 2.0
Conversion Status: Unknown
Percentage Encrypted: Unknown%
Encryption Method: AES 128
Protection Status: Unknown
Lock Status: Locked
Identification Field: Unknown
Automatic Unlock: Disabled
Key Protectors:
Password
Numerical PasswordVolume H: [Data]
[Data Volume]Size: 114.10 GB
BitLocker Version: None
Conversion Status: Fully Decrypted
Percentage Encrypted: 0.0%
Encryption Method: None
Protection Status: Protection Off
Lock Status: Unlocked
Identification Field: None
Automatic Unlock: Disabled
Key Protectors: None FoundX:\windows\system32>manage-bde -unlock L: -password
BitLocker Drive Encryption: Configuration Tool version 10.0.19041
Copyright (C) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.Enter the password to unlock this volume:
The password successfully unlocked volume L:.X:\windows\system32>dir L:
Volume in drive L is Seagate250gb
Volume Serial Number is 1052-D550Directory of L:\
07/11/2020 00:08 46,379,683,840 MyBackup(1).tibx
05/11/2020 00:51 45,030,981,632 MyBackup.tibx
2 File(s) 91,410,665,472 bytes
0 Dir(s) 158,538,076,160 bytes freeX:\windows\system32>"X:\Program Files\Acronis\TrueImageHome\trueimage_starter.exe"
X:\windows\system32>
Thanks, I'll look into it.
Just a little post script on this one.
Turns out the issue wasn't resolved after all.
A week later I had another issue related to a local backup that I won't go into here. Since the clean reinstall was so straightforward and fresh in my memory, I decided to just do it again rather than spend a lot of time troubleshooting, but when I signed back in the existing cloud backup knew it was supposed to be France, but wouldn't connect again. ANOTHER clean install, and once again it said (incorrectly) it was in the UK, but it would back up. The problem is it wanted to perform a full backup, all 1tb of it, data that was already backed up and unchanged. Worse, the ability to recover files vanished, both from the client and the web UI (despite a tb of my allowance being used up by it)
Fast forward to today, and after much back and forth, and about 2 solid weeks of uploading to a contingency backup, I watched a support rep pick through the logs from the 'antebellum' period between tickets (themselves retrieved from a local backup, the originals nuked by subsequent clean installs) Despite the fact the UI reported no errors, we couldn't find a single log with a successful completion.
I guess it just goes to show, if you don't test recovery, you don't know its working.