Acronis True Image 2011 Issues
Good day. I have been using Acronis for a few years. This latest version (2011) has a few problems.
1. I have a 2 TB and a 1 TB WD My Book External Hard Drives for my main workstation (x32 Win7 HP) and my laptop (x64 Win7 HP), respectively. No problems with the 2 TB drive, but when I attempt a disk Image (complete backup), ATI calculates for awhile and then announces that the target drive has insufficient space. Most of the drive is free (+800GB) free) for a 70GB backup. If I tell it to Ignore, it proceeds to backup normally.
2. About the time that the latest build of ATIH2011 came out and I installed it a few weeks, I also signed up for Online Backup for both computers. I have no tasks scheduled in either ATI or AOB, and yet everytime I start my laptop (not my main workstation) now, I get an error being announced that a scheduled task did not complete. I went into the log file and I have attached the info on the error. I searched the KB, but there is no reference to that error, so it says. I am at a loss to figure out what task is failing since no tasks are scheduled.
3. I Validate all of my backups as they are created and tasks announce that they have successfully completed and the show "green" whenever I launch ATIH, but when I go launch my data and email backups (not a full disc image), the backup starts and ATIH reports that the backup is corrupt. It then runs normally and announces a successful completion at the end.
The laptop is a DELL Studio XPS 1645, i7 @ 1.66 GHz, and 8 GB of RAM. I am wondering if ATIH is having difficulties with the x64 OS ... ?
Any assistance would be appreciated as apparently unless I pay for support, there is none after 30 days except for you good folks in this forum. I am a little disappointed in that policy. They don't exactly give ATIH away and these bugs are a nuisance.
Have a great day.
Regards,
-Phil
Pat: Thank you for your expertise. I am really reluctant to uninstall and reinstall - lots of time and effort. It may come to that, but my main beef was the error message about Failed Validation on bootup.
As you suggested, ATIH2011 had scheduled monthly validations. I turned that off. I backup my data and email to a USB flash drive and my system to a 1 TB external hard drive, none of which are normally connected to the laptop unless I am going to run backups. So, ATIH2011, as you deduced, was unable to find the path to validate the data and email backups, that it had scheduled for itself every month. Learn something new every day.
I can live with the 1 TB external drive getting messages of insufficient space - I just "IGNORE" it and everything works fine afterwards. As for the banners, I am glad that they are just an "enhanced feature" of ATIH2011. Hopefully, Acronis will get around to fixing some of these annoying bugs.
Thank you again so much for your expertise. If problems continue, I will definitely take your advice and uninstall, reinstall, and reactivate.
I am very grateful for your advice. Acronis Support is a misnomer unless you pay, I guess. Thank goodness for you volunteers here in the forum. I belong to another forum for another produce (video editing) and the Help Support there is helpless as well. I guess a lot of the big companies are shorting their customers on Technical Support. Then, on the other hand, there are companies that bend over backwards to assist users. Oh well, ATIH seems to be a pretty good product and I have always been able to recover when I needed to, so I guess I will stick with them ... for now. Have a great day and thanks again.
Regards,
-Phil
Philip,
Your validation issue is clearly about a problem with scripts and scheduler.
There are 2 ways to clear this up:
MANUAL:
- copy the TIB files you want to keep to another directory,
- delete all your backup tasks
- clear the directory in c:\programdata\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Scripts
- download the Acronis Schedule Manager, ZAP all your tasks
- recreate your tasks and, in the validation schedule, uncheck all boxes under advanced settings.
AUTOMATIC:
- uninstall, reboot, reinstall. This will keep your TIB files, but all your backup tasks, scripts and schedules will be gone. You can export them before you uninstall and reimport them after reinstalling.
Thanks, Pat. I followed the instructions in the link to the KB advice that you gave Gaslad. I will see if that registry tweak cleared up the warning message as I have turned off the monthly validation option under Advanced. I really don't like uninstalling and reinstalling UNLESS it is absolutely necessary.
Thanks again for your time and expertise. Have a great day.
Regards,
-Phil
Philip,
Just to be clear, the fix for Gaslad is not a fix for you. You have a different issue with the scripts/scheduler. So you might get rid of the notification, but the error will still be there.
Pat: Thanks for your advice. I will be happy if the error message is gone for as far as I know, my backups (image and files) are good. Once Acronis releases the next build, I think I will probably take the plunge and uninstall and reinstall and then recreate everything, now that I know about that I must disable that pesky one-month auto validation default under Advanced.
Thanks again for your time and expertise. Have a great day.
Regards,
-Phil
I just ordered TI 2011 family pack. I want to confirm this now has full SSD support and check on bug fixes. Im seeing a large number of negative reviews online both on Cnet and Amazon. Will Acronis release an updates to fix the issues being reported with the UI hangs etc... I have been a long time supporter of Acronis but it seems the latest version may not be worth installing. I rely on this software and have needed it in the past to recover from HDD failures etc.. My 2010 version has been working well for me with the exception of alignment for my SSD drives.
Cyborg1024,
You can easily align your image, even with 2010, during a restore operation. If your recovery CD works well, stay with 2010.
I had problems getting that to work even when setting the starting offset and following the forum guides. I ended up aligning using an Acronis Partition Utility that was available for one of my drives after it was restored to the new drive.
I'm not sure if I should keep the 2011 family pack or resell it. In the past I have had good luck with Acronis True Image Products. All I'm really after is a solution that's going to offer reliable backups of my PC's. If the 2011 offers performance increases with SSD support I would like to go that route. I also don't mind doing a custom install if removing specific features if that makes it stable or if an updated patch corrects the problems that's fine too.
I may just hang onto the family pack and wait to install it after sufficient patches are released to correct the core bugs.
One additional question can 2010 images be reliably restored with TI 2011? I checked New Egg and the reviews appeared to be more positive then other sites, possibly that could be due to the fact they have more tech savvy and system builders as customers? Even so only about 50% gave it 4-5 stars. Normally if a software product doesnt have 80% or better I wont even consider it so I'm taking a chance and hoping that any problems will be patched in good time. I will likely try the 2011 product on a test PC to see how it performs before jumping in all the way. Also is it possible to not install the integration components. I would prefer to not have the software replace operating system functions for backup. I prefer to do manual backups once a week to a server and then move a copy to a safe once a month. This seems to work very well and allows for a good level of protection against any data crisis.
If you partition your disk manually prior to a restore, you will align your disk. Then you can restore each partition on the manually created partition, and your disk will stay aligned. Using the Windows installation/recovery DVD and DISKPART is pretty easy.
2011 makes it easier by automatically created the right 1MB offset when you restore each partition individually. If you restore a non-aligned image as a whole disk, the result will not be aligned.
I am using 2011 with an SSD and I did about 20 restores at this point. No issues. There are many quirks and bugs with 2011, but with enough backup space you can define backup schemes that work well.