Why doesn't the program just work
I would think this is a basic program. It backs up the partition or files. But there are so many problems with it, its very frustrating.
Currently I am having trouble with the partition backup. Its scheduled weekly on Thursday. I was away for 2 weeks. Not sure why it didnt work last thursday. I was out of the office, with the computer off yesterday. When I turned it on this morning, it tried to back up, but said it would take over 10 hours. So I cancelled it.
I hit start backup a bit later, and it has shown Time Left: 23 minutes, for 1/2 hour. So its obviously stuck.
Norton is showing high disc usage by Acronis, but I do not see any movment or backup activity.
It seems that if you dont keep your computer on all the time, the backup gets messed up. So now I do not have a backup for 6 weeks now.
Problem happened again. I was out on Thursday for Thanksgiving. So when I returned on Monday morning, it tried to do the weekly partition backup. But it shows its going to take over 5 hours, and after 45 minutes still says over 5 hours. It seems it cannot handle the computer being off when its scheduled to backup.
In my experience, Acronis has never worked. Sure, I've been able to recover the odd file from time to time, but I really bought it to preserve a pristine image of my hard drive immediately after a total reinstall of Win 7 and Office 2010. I backed up 2 images separated by a few days in order to have near pristine backups at two stages. That was a year ago. This evening I attempted to restore, and BOTH failed. It said it couldn't find the files. I browsed, re-added them as per instructions. Same results. I copied the files to another drive in case there was a shut-down feature on that hard drive (a Maxtor designed for backup itself - ANOTHER story there), and exactly the same result again.
After typing in some 45 characters or so, I was told there is no info on that code now. (Hey Fellas - pssst! its still 2014!!). This is NOT simply a failure to backup a file. Its my whole bloody hard drive, and now, less than 4 weeks before Christmas I have to drive an hour with the computer to get the shop to do what they did a year ago!
I long since gave up using an elaborate program that combines all files backed up into one massive, unrecognisable file that you need to master the original backup program to restore a single file! I now have 2x2gig pocket hard drives for alterenate days, and I use a simple batch file with DOS commands and switches to copy versions of files dated later than the same day last week. It takes about a minute each night, and I have 14 copies of everything in a form I can actually manipulate.
It is by no means the first time Acronis has let me down. I'll NEVER buy Necrosis... I mean Acronis again!
Keith, what works for me is having a completely separate PC dedicated to backups. That's where Acronis in a mode of either cloning one drive to another or cloning drive to an image and then image to another drive works fine. This has been working very well on a separate clean PC for many years.
However, for some odd reason, other features, which are definitely more convinient, such as NonStop or Scheduled Incremental backups seem to have issues from version to version. And that's rather unfortunate. I just got a new Acronis 2014, and discovered that NonStop has issues while Acronis 2013 worked fine.
I just noticed the program deleted all the older chains even though I have it to save the last 2 /3 chains for both Daily file backup and Weekly Partition backup. I mean its pretty clear what is checked off as the setting. I cannot even understand why it would delete ALL previous partion backups when it did the weekly back up this Thursday. :(