Tags
I have just removed Acronis true image 2014 from my laptop and breathed a sigh of relief. Backup software should make you feel that your computer is safer than it was before, Acronis did not.
— Update 2016-01-03 read about my new approach to backup —
–update 6 June 2014–
I am now using StorageCraft ShadowProtect and it is working very well. Read about my experiences here.
—
Acronis’ interface and messages are so chaotic that one is in perpetual state of anxiety about where one’s data is and what progress has been made with either a backup or recovery.
Acronis has perhaps the most comprehensive set of features of any backup product. Unfortunately they don’t seem to work, or more exactly they don’t work very well for me.
Non-stop backup is unreliable
I created an Acronis Secure Zone (i.e. hidden partition) on my laptop’s C drive and set non-stop backup running. This creates an incremental backup every 5 minutes and is intended to allow the recovery of accidentally deleted files. It can also be used to restore the hard drive if the operating system is corrupted and won’t boot but there is nothing wrong with the disc. This is particularly valuable for people like myself who travel with their laptop and don’t have access to the backup archive.
I “tested” The file restore functionality by accidentally deleting 18 GB of files but a after many hours the restore crashed.
Acronis non-stop frequently stopped during the day for no apparent reason and would either start will not start at boot at random.
When it is running it seems to impair performance.
Restore from archive is buggy and slow
The primary use case for backup software to create a remote archive. I set the nightly job to create differential backups to my Windows Home Server.
Having failed to restore the files from the non-stop backup archive I used the restore functionality to restore them from the nightly tape archive. Although Acronis may have been restoring files there was very little CPU or disk activity and after an hour or so I cancelled the restore. I used the Acronis image mounting facility to mount the archive as and image and then copied the files out using Windows. This worked well and showed a data transfer rate of 5 Mb per second. Although I have nothing to compare this with it seems a bit slow.
Removing the Acronis Recovery Zone
When I attempted to remove the Acronis Recovery Zone the PC simply locked up for half an hour with no feedback about progress. I held my nerve and went and had a cup of tea. Eventually I did get control back and the zone had been removed but the software never prompted me to return the unallocated storage to the primary partition.
Summary
Acronis could argue with justification that they cannot be wholly responsible for the performance of backup and restore operations in a world where hardware and networks are so varied. However the user interface and user feedback is appalling and these are under their control. I think it is reasonable to assume that this careless attitude may apply to their core backup and restore functions as well.
I will now trial StorageCraft ShadowProtect.
Dr James Bayley 
Pingback: The best Acronis backup scheme | Dr James Bayley
As a PM you should know to KISS. I’m a long time Acronis user who enjoys the basic strength of the product — whole partition image backups — without trying to get too fancy.
First, I never use a *single* partition on Windows. Separate your system partition from your data partition. (EASEUS is a free and easy to use partition manager.)
After creating a brand new Windows OS, make a virgin system image.
After installing most of your basic operating software (virus, firewall, etc) make a base system image.
You are now in a position to restore, virus-free, either a brand new virgin system or a system that is “close” to your operating environment. Restore each image to validate your image and learn the procedure.
And now, your data backups are no longer burdened or co-mingled with your OS backups.
I cant tell you what you’re requirements are, but I have resigned to losing today’s work so I don’t have to restore to the last moment. Your requirement is a very stiff requirement, that you might want to revisit.
Throw hardware at the problem. Its cheap, and its your livelihood.
I use a QNAP NAS with mirrored drives. What do 2 x 3TB drives cost? Nothing. Spend the money.
For data, I do full daily backups over the network each night. From my PC with some drives I can get up to 80MB/sec over the network. Usual is at least 35Mb/sec.
For OS, I do full backups, “whenever”. I don’t worry so much about them, since to “clean up” my system I will restore either the Virgin or Base and re-install to my current OS level. Yes, it takes some documentation, but It’s not that hard.
For your data, I might recommend weekly differentials.
Or you might be able to further partition your data over two partitions, one for mostly “static” data and another for you dynamic data that changes each day. If your static data is large you can back it up nightly using differential, and if your daily dynamic is smallish you can do a full backup each night.
This has worked for me for years. I haven’t changed the strategy, through two replacements of hard drives on my QNAP NAS. I never lost a byte, and I have taken several drive hits over the years. My experience with drive failures is that drives degrade via unrecoverable bad spots, but I have never lost an entire drive at once, to power, or dropping it in the bathtub or whatever.
Good luck.
Thank you for very helpful feedback. I particularly like your advice about separating the OS and data onto different partitions. Windows 8 with One Drive offers some nice possibilities for continuous data backup and you might be interested in this post.
https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2014/09/22/how-to-backup-data-to-onedrive-in-real-time/
I read with interest that you do as I do – that is, divide the HD into partitions and store OS and some utilities on one and data and misc files on the other.
Until now, I have made back-ups, but not had to do restoring. However, I tried doing a restore to a new disk and Acronis would not let me specify what is to be stored on C: or D:, instead, running from CD, it asked where to restore but I couldn’t specify two destinations and which files were to go to which partitions. In fact, it put everything into the C: drive!
I had tried running from Windows, which let me specify the above mentioned things, but gave me trouble with files that the OS was using.
Acronis is not forthcoming with good detailed information about the restore process and doesn’t even discuss how to start a restore from a differential back-up and whether one must first restore the full back-up first, or if the program is smart enough to restore that one first.
Mainly, I am concerned with the fact that I have two partitions in a single back-up and don’t know how to make Acronis restore the files back into the appropriate locations…
Do you create one back-up for each of your partitions, or store them both in the same archive? In any case, I would like to know how to do the recovery from the archives I have.
Thanks.
=DM=
David, if the restore fails at least you have your data. I gave up on Acronis and other legacy backup techniques and moved to using OneDrive as described here.
https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2016/01/03/the-definative-guide-to-backing-up-your-home-computer/
If you want a simple Acronis replacement you should consider Veeam Desktop backup. It is free, and it works. I have used it for hundreds of restores at work and it has never failed. It also supports multiple partitions and resizing but I have not tested that aspect.
The short answer is, “yes”, I create distinct archives for each — system and data partition. Each were previously archived as whole partitions(drives), not file systems.
The restore process for a system partition is inherently different from the restore process for data, because there are issues with over-writing active system files such as page files, logs, etc.
For both backup and restore of a system drive, I use the so-called “rescue” drive which executes in the pre-boot environment, WinPE. Acronis allows you to create a bootable rescue drive, which when booted from allows you to fire up the Acronis product. Booting from the rescue drive, it is possible to restore the system archive because the boot OS resides in memory and is not over-writing any active files. (Of course “seeing” the system archive, particularly if its on a network drive might be harder in the pre-boot environment. Generally, the Windows functions available in the pre-boot environment are not nearly as robust as full Windows.)
My system partition archives usually contain several “drives” (components), such as MBR, and a small recovery partition. My recollection is that Acronis restore allows one to choose which archived drives are to be restored, and to which destination drive as well. When I backup and restore a system partition I always include the companions, MBR and recovery partition.
Now the bad news. You were supposed to create the WinPE rescue drive *BEFORE* creating a serious system archive, and you were supposed to execute a system drive backup and restore to validate (and practice) your entire process *BEFORE* later creating serious system archives. I usually do this immediately after I purchase a new product. I create both a Windows system backup and Acronis system backup of a “clean” air-gapped system. It is during this time that I debug my Acronis system backup and restore process. The air-gapped system image is vital, since it is known to be clean of any virus, and if necessary would allow me to return the system partition to its pristine state.
I just went through this with a new Dell XPS laptop, and its quite a gut-wrenching and arduous process, because the Acronis WinPE environment is not always very robust, and in newer systems, such as laptops with SSDs and QHD displays, the default WinPE rescue drive created by Acronis is sadly lacking.
Once you get out of your current pickle we can have a conversation about whether or not to stay with Acronis or migrate to another product. Good luck.
yeahh its nice and perfect but only in your dreams..! are you employer of acronis ?!?! because i havnt good experience with acronis at all like your dream..
I do the same thing and that works just fine. I have tried the other tools but usually with a lot of aggravation. For continuous backup i use Dropbox.
I’m a long time Acronis True Image user and I absolutely agree, it’s famous for going to a Windows state of ‘Not Responding’ for long periods of time while it does… whatever. One cannot be sure if it’s crashed, about to finish, or will finish on Tuesday.
I am finding that StorageProtect works very very reliably but I have limited space for backup sets on my server and I find it very difficult to create a backup strategy that does not fill it up. Backup is hard.
For Windows 8.1 users who just use Microsoft Office I would simply recommend using Microsoft 365 to back up data in real time and just do a reinstall if the hard drive crashes.
https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2014/09/22/how-to-backup-data-to-onedrive-in-real-time/
I completely agree. I was also a long time Acronis user.
I will uninstall Acronis 2015 this week. It fills the backup media and there is no WORKING obvious way how to remove backup jobs that I no longer want or just want to remove a backup job because of making major changes. It keeps backing up to old backup jobs even after removing them.
Ran into this issue since I wanted to make Acronis keep track of the version chains and limit that to 4 chains. This to ensure I will not run out of space. Acronis will only delete old versions after it has succeeded to make a new backup. This is fine, if it wasn’t for the flaw that it keeps filling the drive with old removed backup jobs.
Numerous spurious error messages saying it cannot access the destination path, but it clearly can since it was just writing there.
If you want a free and reliable backup client then you should consider Veeam Endpoint Backup. If you really need image management (which is unlikely in a home machine) then you should consider StorageProtect. I am confident I have “solved” the backup problem for domestic power users and my guide is here. https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2016/01/03/the-definative-guide-to-backing-up-your-home-computer/
I have removed Acronis. They have so many issues reported in their forums that never got fixed or even confirmed.
Trying Veeam now.
Thank you for the feedback and please feel free to update this thread with your thoughts on Veeam.
Dr. James Bayley (06/24/17):
Re: Acronis 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, etc…..Home & Server Versions
– I’m an electrical engineer (46+ years field duty) and have been around since paper tape media, the 8″ floppy and 5mb removable platters.
– As you may surmise, I continue to be appalled at the anarchy of software development over the last generation.
– In my youthful training (IBM, Motorola, Unix), we developed the user’s manual (architectural plans) first, then created the software to those exact specifications. These days, the “plans” are haphazard and the user’s manual (if any) is the last item of concern. So, let’s get a hammer, some nails and a saw and build the house, with no detailed plans. Who needs a tape measure anyway? I wonder if any rooms will actually be square! This is the pattern for many current software packages today.
– I went from Symantec Backup Exec to Acronis data backup software many years ago. The original Acronis 2010 (although slightly problematic) was the easiest to configure and actually troubleshoot.
– Sadly, through the progressing versions, I’ve watched Acronis follow the Microsoft format of increased inconsistency between versions, and the constant bewildering habit of moving settings around to areas that make very little technical sense. Sadly, in the Microsoft fashion, a user will waste more time trying to find a setting or control, than using the product; moving them to the point of absolute frustration.
– Example: Making a simple change to an existing backup job. In the 2010 version, you simply select the job and edit. With 2014 and above…where in God’s earth did they move, hide or disguise that simple function? You cannot even find a backup job, let alone edit it. And there is very little help with this simple task.
– Most sadly, Acronis has perverted their own products to the point of absolute confusion, frustration and random guessing.
– For the same flawed Microsoft reasons, each version of Acronis has to be more “GUI” based (to make them pretty), instead of simple, functional logical flow.
– And don’t get me started with the “Windows 10″…let’s make every computer look like an IPhone trek.
– I’ve actually found that the “EaseUS” products are far superior; especially for servers and moving existing systems to new hardware platforms, with the applications software/settings/data fully intact.
– I welcome your suggestions enforcing the “KISS” principle.
– Please continue your direction of research. You make perfect sense.
– Respectfully…from a very, very old IT guy coming to the end of my era…
– p.s. I actually remember disk drives with hydraulic actuated heads and computers with 4kb of memory. Can you say “8008 processor”?
– G.W. Humphrey, Electrical Engineer, Simple Solutions Ltd.
– End
I’m very close to trashing Acronis, too. It’s interface is clumsy and difficult to use, and worse, it’s unreliable. I started with DOS, and this is one of the worst programs I ever used. I waiting until I find something good to replace Acornis.
After several years of research I have written a definitive guide to backing up your home computer. https://blog.jamesbayley.com/2016/01/03/the-definative-guide-to-backing-up-your-home-computer/
I hope you find it useful.
TY James.. my experience was very bad..! about 2 – 3 years ago i was downloading one tiny cmd file from acronis that for changing hard disk sectors system or some, i dont remember actually.. but it was about changing partition sectors just like a refragmentation disk and its result was must be better recovering or restoring partitions result if you have need…. but after cmd process was 100% guess what it doing ?!!? IT WAS FORMATTED MY D DRIVE !! {my everything except windows which installed in c }… i dont know why.. and i was very angry for that..! i am pro user and working with computer about 14-15 years.. i havnt any other storage for recovery files.. and i recovered on same drive , mean D.. so half of my files gone for ever,, cause a ” REWRITING files”.. when you want recovery partition on itself .. i very very angry for that.. and i never ever using acronis again.. which must be protecting your data, not a deleting that !! shame for such a big company like that..
sry for english..