Caveat Emptor - Acronis Backup & Restore

[Jeff Zylstra]

It's been a long road with this.  And although I hated Backup Exec, I must say that at least it was consistent and reliable for the most part.  Unfortunately, I can't say that for Acronis.  For the last month, I've been fighting 3 separate battles with their Backup & Restore 10.0 product.  The first was an issue where it would not delete backup archive files reliably, which would lead to a disk full message on the disk.  I was told that the latest build for that program fixed the issue.  

Unfortunately, it created a new problem.  Whenever I would plug in my Hitachi USB hard drives, it would start the virtual disk manager in Server 2008 and tell me that the drives needed to be formatted.  Of course, you couldn't format the drives, couldn't recognize the volume on the drive and couldn't eject the drive to unplug it.  I have one Seagate USB drive that worked fine with it, but 10 Hitachi drives that did not.  Figures.  Apparently Acronis does something with volume locking on the drives that causes fits with some USB drives.  

The other problem occurred when I wrote a batch file to delete all of the .TIB backup archive files over so many days old.  Since my batch file, and not the Acronis program deleted the files, Acronis would tell me that an archive was missing, not perform the backup and would also not create a new archive either.

So, now I have uninstalled the latest version and I'm back to the earlier version which seems to work for the moment with a workaround for getting the archive to delete properly.  I have a feeling that there is much turmoil at Acronis right now.  I just hope they get it straightened out quickly. Buyer beware.

[Jeff Zylstra]

So I work on this with a tech for almost a week and finally on my own, decide to uninstall, cleanup the old install and reinstall to a previous version.  That gets it working again, so I post on Acronis' website and within 40 minutes get this response from a moderator.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/10693


Hello Jeff Zylstra,

I would like to thank you for your feedback regarding this issue.

Our Development team is aware of this and we are currently working on a fix. As a workaround, updating to the latest version of our low-level SnapApi drivers fixes this issue. If you decide to switch back to build 11639, you can send a PM to one of our forum moderators and we will generate a unique link for you, from which you can download the SnapApi update.

Once again, thank you very much for your post!

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

Forty minutes and he has pegged the problem.  I guess the moral of that story is to not trust the "expert" tech support division, but rather check the knowledge base more thoroughly. 

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

LOL - and as I read your post the ad above was "Acronis - Best Backup..."