"Known Issues": My Acronis Horror Story

[Fatal_Papercut~SPARTA~]

I've been a user of the Acronis True Image software for a few years now, but it's been quite some time since I last upgraded to the latest version. With the release of Acronis True Image Home 2012 and a barrage of emails from the company offering the software at a substantial discount, I decided to bite.

 

Right out of the gate, there were problems: I could not install the software. The new version--being an upgrade--required me to enter the serial # of my old version, which the software did not recognize as being valid. After 45 minutes of online chats with two of their support representatives, it turns out that there is a "known issue" with upgrade activations, and currently the only way to activate an upgrade version is to allow one of their tech reps to remote access your machine to do some registry editing. I normally would have balked at this idea, but I really needed to run some back-ups, so I let them do it.

 

One of the great features of past Acronis products is that, from the Windows environment, it could do a back-up of the actual drive Windows was installed on. Some products cannot do this. This is great because it makes good use of fast, multi-core CPUs for compressing the back-up files. It significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to do large backups.

 

Unfortunately, there is a "known issue" with this feature in the current version where you can't back up your boot drive, at least not from within Windows (you have to use the bootable media to do it). Furthermore, Acronis is supposed to be able to recognize NAS devices as valid backup sources, but again, there is a "known issue" where they are currently not supported.

 

So, the only means I had to do any sort of backup was to use the tool to create a bootable CD or USB drive (I did both, of course) and start my backups from that Linux environment.

 

Unfortunately, there is a "known issue" that causes the Linux-based bootable rescue media to crash during the loading process, causing the PC to reboot.

 

So, to recap, after 2 hours of chats with the Acronis tech reps, I learned that: you can't install it, you can't create backups of the boot drive from Windows, and you can't create a working recovery disc/drive.

 

Would it be a bit redundant for me to say that I would not recommend this product?

[EL_n00biachi]

Thanks for recommending this,i have it pre ordered and got a free 250mb quantum fireball hd with it.

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

Fatal,

 

Take a look at this: EaseUs TodoBackup PC - FREE - It does everything without known errors and it does it for free.

http://www.todo-backup.com/

 

Free download:

http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

[MH6~SPARTA~]

Fatal,

 

Take a look at this: EaseUs TodoBackup PC - FREE - It does everything without known errors and it does it for free.

http://www.todo-backup.com/

 

Free download:

http://www.todo-back...up-software.htm

 

I second Batwing's recommendation, I've used EaseUs TodoBackup to mirror and backup hard drives on 3 separate PCs.

[Fatal_Papercut~SPARTA~]

Fatal,

 

Take a look at this: EaseUs TodoBackup PC - FREE - It does everything without known errors and it does it for free.

http://www.todo-backup.com/

 

Thanks for this recommendation. "Free" certainly beats what some of the commercial packages are asking for. I will give it a go this morning.

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

I have downloaded the recommended program.

 

On machine A;

I want to create a new C: drive on my Revo drive (which has just been returned to me) using the current c: SSD. Do I just use Disk clone?

I want to then wipe the SSD and install it on machine B

 

Machine B has a 750gb HD I want to put the operating system and Arma in one partition and and the rest in another partition, then I want to clone the first partition onto the SSD. Is this doable?

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

I never used the Disk Clone option.

 

I do assume it does what it says. An identical image of a disk or maybe having 2 disks installed on the same machine, it will clone one to another on the fly. Then you remove the one you dont need anymore and the new one stays.

 

Not sure how it handle space, meaning if you clone a 128GB to a 256gb, what happens with the extra room? Test and try, maybe the extra room is there as unpartitioned space and you can create a new partion out of it, I have no clue.

 

What I usually do based on your example is:

 

Machine A: Create Backup of whatever you want and then using the boot disk, restore the created partition on the new disk.

 

Machine B; similar; Create backup of OS + Arma partition, then restore on the SSD. Make sure the SSD become Active partition or your PC will continue booting from the HD

[MH6~SPARTA~]

I have downloaded the recommended program.

 

On machine A;

I want to create a new C: drive on my Revo drive (which has just been returned to me) using the current c: SSD. Do I just use Disk clone?

I want to then wipe the SSD and install it on machine B

 

Machine B has a 750gb HD I want to put the operating system and Arma in one partition and and the rest in another partition, then I want to clone the first partition onto the SSD. Is this doable?

 

Yes you can either clone the SSD entirely to the new hard drive or copy just the partitions that you want. I would recommend you create a boot CD though if you are planning to copy your O/S as well (Todo Backup can copy the O/S when it is active I believe, but I always feel better when the O/S is not active, to prevent situations where a file is locked by the O/S and cannot be copied)

 

Easiest way to do this is to just download Easeus Disk Copy (same guys that make Todo Backup) which will allow you to easily create a bootable CD.

 

Then you put this CD in, boot your machine using the CD (hit Escape or F12 during startup to change your first boot device to the CD drive if it isn't by default), and then you can copy either the entire SSD over or just select partitions. Since you are copying to a larger hard drive, you will also have extra space left over available for use.

 

Just make sure to check and double-check that your source and destination drives are correct. You don't want to be copying the wrong data to the wrong drive, and possibly losing data. Should be easy enough to tell though, as they are named.

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

Thanks for answering. Unfortunately the Revodrive is a ball ache to install, it needs raid drivers and I can only see how to install them during the windows installation. So I need to do a full install.

 

When I move onto phase 2 I may hit you up again.

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

Ok, enlight me about this. Do you have Win 7?

 

Is Revo a single SSD ?

 

Why does it requires RAID drivers? Maybe is just a different kind of Driver (like it was the SCSI driver in the past?) ?

 

Is that meaning during install is asking "Insert floppy with Driver" which actually scares the crap out of me because no one in this Century has floppies anymore

 

I didn t move to the SSD experience yet but I d like to be preparred to know what s going on.

[peter~SPARTA~]

Ask google for ssd pci

[NoScream~SPARTA~]

Ask google for ssd pci

 

 

Don't ask for a miracle....

Let me google that for you

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Revo+SSD

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

The Revo drive is a PCIe drive, mine is a 120gb drive (but thats a 110 real). It is one card with 2x55gb in raid0. It has an onboard raid controller. It is this controller that windows does not have a driver for. I have finally figured out how to enable the driver on my SSD3 (after some prompting from Hajimoto). I can now see the drive so I will have a go at cloning the SSD3 onto the Revo Drive.

 

I hope this brief summary helps

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

I have cloned the ssd onto the revo drive without drama. It took about 16 minutes which surprised me and at one point I thought it had failed. But here I am on the Revo drive and all is well.

 

The only problem I had was with NFS Shift 2 where I had run out of activations, I was eventually given 3 more, but there is no way to de-authorize a steam version of the game, unfortunately the clone did not work for the authorization so I had to use one.

 

Thanks for pointing me to EaseUS.

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

The Revo drive is a PCIe drive, mine is a 120gb drive (but thats a 110 real). It is one card with 2x55gb in raid0. It has an onboard raid controller. It is this controller that windows does not have a driver for. I have finally figured out how to enable the driver on my SSD3 (after some prompting from Hajimoto). I can now see the drive so I will have a go at cloning the SSD3 onto the Revo Drive.

 

I hope this brief summary helps

 

This is perfectly explanative. Being a separate RAID controller from the MB that s why Win needs the drive.

 

Very interesting the technology they used for this device. Choosing 2 smaller units 55GB and mounting them in RAID 0 to improve performances. Then my idea to get 2 Kingston 64GB and put them in RAID 0 makes a lot of sense.

 

I wonder if the drive failure was indeed due to a RAID 0 degradation.

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

I am excited about this free back up tool. I dug up one of my raptors and will now back up the ssd regularly onto that drive, thanks for pointing me to this.

[SirSmokalot]

Nice, like alternatives for friends and family!

 

I personally use Acronis yet another version, 2011. I upgraded from version 9 though and it works for me. Been trying to get funds for the Exterprise version to replace Ghost at work.

 

But I know what you mean about the promotion emails, could have got it for 50% off or what not recently and thought why do I need to? Even upgraded to 2011 for better cloning tools that worked better with moving a Win 7 partition over to another drive....even then I don't know what made it so special, data is data on a drive.

 

Lately for backups however, I've been using WHS 2011 (Windows Home Server) lately and I like the recovery options as its super easy, but that's a different paradigm!

 

Z3no, we had troubles with 2 Revo drives lately, its like we lost the OS completely a couple times and the boot partition would come up after a few reboots. Did you have this same problem? Not sure if it was the PCI X bus that was at fault or the card....we returned it for a pair of Vertex 3 drives (which worked fine for a week, then intermittent issues) and it seems Dell Precision workstations don't do too well with SSD's???....not sure why!?? Dell states it will be fixed in the next BIOS update.... Dunno about that!

Edited October 12, 2011 by SirSmokalot

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

My Revo stopped reporting 110gb and showed only 55gb, so possibly the onboard RAID controller failed, not sure really, they sent me a new Revo.

[Batwing~SPARTA~]

I have a light experience on RAID, that symptom seems tell to me 1 of the 2 SSD part of the RAID Volume failed and got degraded.

 

Most of the time you can still boot your system in that condition but is highly unreliable and most probably many programs will not work.

 

The RAID controller worked fine, 1 of the 2 SSD failed.

 

Reading around of so many failures here and there. Single or RAID configs. SSD was supposed to be not only faster but most importantly Safer because of no moving parts. Where is the catch???

 

After spending so much money for such a small drive I would be piss like a Rhino if it was going to fail and waste my data.

 

Sure, you can tell me "all electronic fails.. it just happens" nonetheless if you spend 3 times the price for something and the buttom line is that is supposed to be safer, I would be pissed.

[EL_n00biachi]

Well it does happen and that is why under European law "Directive 1999/44/EC" article 5, electronics retailers are forced to give out a minimum warranty\guarantee of 2 years.

Sometimes they state they only have 1 year warranty but this is not according to the law and all you have to do is tell them that is against the law and shove them that article down their throat.

Obviously Zeno has no problems with his,seeing as they have already sent him a new one,which is awesome cause usually "they" always blame the consumer...cause their products are soooo good....

 

It is what it is when it comes to Raid 0,the chance of errors on the "disk" are obviously twice as big even-though an SSD's lifespan is directly related to how many times you write something to that disk...but anything else...; it is a good idea to make sure stuff that write to disk alot arent on the SSD; browser cache and pagefile.

[Zeno~SPARTA~]

Good info Noob, I had already moved Documents, Pictures, Music, video and download to another drive, But now I have moved pagefile as well. I will check he caches.