It all started with a bad default setting...

Hello everyone at Acronis!

So, while my beta testing wasn't as great as it could have been, I'll be certain to be going down this road next time, because I definitely would have figured this out in Beta...

I had a computer that needed its data backed up before I wiped it and reinstalled Windows, so I imaged the drive as a whole and did the wipe, intended to pull data out of it. Next, I attempted to selectively restore the files. Going from a 7200RPM hard disk to an SSD, it took over four hours to restore 40GB of files. Whatever. I let that run, and when I attempted to access them, NTFS permissions wouldn't propagate correctly. I then tried mounting the image file to extract them. It wouldn't, because permissions. I tried changing them in the image, but I couldn't because it was read-only. there's not longer a way to mount the image in read/write mode. I tried restoring from the PE disc, but still no luck with permission hell. I repartitioned my hard disk and then attempted to restore to a FAT32 partition, but that didn't work. I looked to see where the "convert to VHD" option was, but apparently copy/pasting that code was a secondary priority over integrating The Cloud (tm).

Meanwhile, the UI became infinitely more confusing as the big honkin' source/destination window was basically meaningless and it was the smaller areas that were more helpful. the PE doesn't talk FTP the same way that the older versions do since neither IIS nor Filezilla showed an attempt at authenticating, even a failed one, so restoring to a VM didn't work out to well, either.

So, I was FINALLY able to get the data back...by repartitioning my hard disk, restoring the partition, and then changing the NTFS permissions.

Thus, we have the following takeaway:

1.) Restore time from archives is obscenely slow.
2.) there's an obscure place when creating an archive that allows NTFS permissions to be ignored; it needs to be more obviously placed.
3.) It should be possible to strip NTFS permissions from the archive ex-post-facto. If "zomg security" is the reason not to do this, then "the archive should be passworded/encrypted" is the correct response.
4.) Covert to VHD needs to come back in some form, even as a standalone widget.
5.) FTP needs to be fixed; it wasn't broken in the last six releases.

Regards,
Joey