e-mail backup up does not complete

I’m using the trial version of Acronis True Image. I’m testing it as a replacement for Norton Ghost, which has recently become unreliable (admittedly it’s version 10 and the current version is 15, but why should it suddenly start to fail after giving good service for several years ?).

So I’m testing Acronis because I need to take backups on more than one computer and Acronis offers a 3 licence pack at a price which is less than Ghost’s single licence pack (and it doesn’t have multi-licence packs).

Backups of my C and D drives appear to be working fine, although I want to run them in parallel with Ghost for a couple of weeks before deciding to buy, or not.

However, the e-mail backup is acting strangely. It runs up to the “27% complete” point and then stops. The remaining time gradually winds up at the rate of a minute per minute, but there seems to be no other activity.

Windows XP Home SP3n and Outlook 2003 is not active during the backup. I haven’t been able to get as far as testing it while Outlook is open and active.

After an hour I cancelled the backup and checked the log. No information at all.

I’ve seen other threads in this forum on the same subject and some of them have suggested checking the number of profiles in the Mail Control Panel. If there’s a problem with the profile then I’m surprised the backup has started at all, but I will check this if someone can be more specific about what to check and where.

Thank you.