Acronis True Image FAIL

[Wathnix]

Just got burned by Acronis true image home 2012. It's a real slick product with lots of great features that FAILS to restore your computer after disaster. I have my computer set for scheduled backups with validation turned on and when I went to restore, all the backups I had were bad.

 

[EarthDog]

Whoa.. sorry to hear about that. I cant say that has ever happened to me however. I wonder what went wrong...?

 

[Pinky]

I had issues in the past with validation failing on backups, turned out to be hard drive issues and/or driver issues preventing creation of proper (non-corrupted) images. If I turned off validation during the creation process everything is fine, but then it would fail on restore.

Remember that the size of these files is HUGE compared to most day to day stuff, plus they're integrity dependent. You can have a badly wrriten one or zero every now and then in a movie file, or mp3, but not in an image file you expect someday to restore from. It's definitely a painful way to realize your system wasn't stable or properly configured.

Not sure if this was indeed your issue, but I can say that I've successfully restored from acronis images many times, so the product does work.

 

[Wathnix]

I've been reading a lot of negative reviews on this program, I still think that a validated backup should be good. The drive itself (actually an array) holds other files just fine.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

I was contacted by Acronis support last night, they should be around in the near future to advise you I expect.

 

[Acronis Support]

Hello Everyone,

Wathnix, we are very sorry about the recovery issue that you experienced and I would like to provide you with additional resources to resolve it and guide you to our Support team.

It is possible the backup has become corrupted, could you please check the following article from our Knowledge Base.

If you still need assistance, please contact our Support team. Please make sure to select recovery issue when you are navigating through the support wizard.

Please let me know if you require additional assistance.

Best regards,
Anton Deev
Acronis Customer Central

 

[EarthDog]

+1 and this is VERY nice to see. Welcome Acronis Support!

 

[Silversinksam]

I was contacted by Acronis support last night, they should be around in the near future to advise you I expect.

You beat me once again, they contacted me as well, and glad they are offering to help.

 

[Wathnix]

Update: I followed the instructions from Acronis Support, while running memtest86+ I did find a bad module, and I just got done doing a trial backup and restore, it was successful. So that is good. However, a few things still bother me about Acronis 2012 that make me wonder about it.

1) I am running both Acronis and Windows Home Server 2011 for backups at the same time, so when the Acronis backups failed I was able to successfully use the backups from WHS without any problems. Why does Acronis fail when a WHS backup from the same time period works perfectly?

2) I had validation turned on, those backups should either have been good or the software should have seen that they were bad and warned me, what is the point of validation if it does not ensure that the backup is usable?

3) this software has been getting mostly 2 and 3 star reviews on amazon and newegg.

I am going to give this a second chance, but I'm still not very confident of this software, which is not something you want in a backup program. I still believe that Acronis has spent too much time building in features and not enough in ensuring bullet-proof backups and restores. I bought this program and want to deploy it on all 8-10 computers in my house and roving computers from friends and family because it offers more features than what WHS offers, but now I'm not so sure....I'm really disappointed that Acronis, who seem to concentrate mostly on backup software are outdone by Microsoft, to whom backup is only one of many things they do.

 

[Acronis Support]

Hello Wathnix,

Thank you very much for replying and we appreciate your feedback.

The validation procedure strongly depends on RAM and HDD integrity, it is possible the module went bad after the successful validation was created.

We will need to look at program logs to understand why the backups failed, I would recommend to collect this report and reach out to our Support team.

Best regards,
Anton Deev,
Acronis Customer Central

 

[King107s]

As mentioned above other mitigating circumstances most likely gave rise to your back up issues. I have been using the Acronis True Image Home for a couple years and have successfully restored backups of my SSD many times. I typically use secure erase the drive and restore the image to refresh the SSD.

I saw you mentioned that you are trying to restore the image to an array... What RAID level are you using and did you confirm that you rebuilt the array after it failed before trying to restore the image?

 

[Pinky]

Memory issues, depending on how severe the failure, can appear and disappear. All depends if the 'bad' parts of the memory are being addressed at that moment in time. As I said early on in this thread, I've personally had issues like that cause my backups to fail. As unpopular as this sounds on an overclocking forum, it's one of the reasons I drifted away from overclocking in general (especially the more extreme stuff for day to day PC use).

 

[King107s]

Memory issues, depending on how severe the failure, can appear and disappear. All depends if the 'bad' parts of the memory are being addressed at that moment in time. As I said early on in this thread, I've personally had issues like that cause my backups to fail. As unpopular as this sounds on an overclocking forum, it's one of the reasons I drifted away from overclocking in general (especially the more extreme stuff for day to day PC use).

Burn him! j/k

Two words can avoid these kinds of problems.... Stability testing

 

[Pinky]

Two words can avoid these kinds of problems.... Stability testing

To some extent, yes. But I have also seen overclocks that pass the standard tests fail at other things, then have those other things suddenly work fine once the machine is put back to stock speeds. It's not an exact science, but I generally tell people if you want to increase the chance of having random hardware related hiccups, then overclock. If you want to increase your chances of having your PC operating problem free, run stock. As is true with so many things, overclocking doesn't guarantee issues any more than running stock eliminates them. But there are patterns that it doesn't take a genius to see - overclocking DOES increase the chances for hardware issues and failures. That's just part of the process.

In the case of doing backups, it might stand to reason to perform the backup and restore at stock speeds to be on the safe side.

I'm just glad the issue was 'resolved'. I recommend Acronis solutions (as well as Paragon, which costs a lot more though). I'd hate to be the one telling people to buy something that isn't worthy of the recommendation.

 

[ziggo0]

Just to add...I'm a bad boy and didn't use validation for the longest time. From 60gb images to 100gb+ images and have never had a single issue. All backed up to a network share and restored from it. Sucks for your ram tho.

 

[SteveLord]

I recently encountered what may be my first bad backup with Acronis Backup and Recovery. But I am sure it was because I was trying to deploy it to a virtual hard drive, which I do not recommend. Wasn't a major loss. I have been using Acronis at work here for 3 years now and it's been one of my best/easiest tools. I can't comment on their support.

Good luck to the OP.

 

[Wathnix]

I saw you mentioned that you are trying to restore the image to an array... What RAID level are you using and did you confirm that you rebuilt the array after it failed before trying to restore the image?

It's not a RAID array, it is a add-in for WHS called 'Drive Pool' which merges several drives into one big drive, just like JBOD, however I also have WHS set to duplicate all folders on that JBOD drive, which WHS does by ensuring that all files and folders are copied on to separate hard drives. It's not the greatest in file security, but it's done me good so far. The nice thing about Drive Pool/WHS solution is that you can add or remove any number of drives at any time without having to rebuild the array from scratch. In the event of a failed drive you simply remove it from Drive Pool and the array will automatically resize, reduplicate and rebalance as required, then plunk in a new drive a few weeks later when you get it back from RMA.

 

[g0dM@n]

I've been using Acronis for YEARS... I've had some failures, but that's why I keep multiple copies (I always have more than one range of differential backups).