Being so small, either the first incremental backup didn’t work properly or it didn’t have much to back up.
Do you have tens of thousands of emails in those folders? Do they receive e-mail every day? If so, then the mailbox files are no doubt huge.
I can’t see any advantage to backing up just files in addition to a full disk image. The disk image is everything you have, no doubts, why not stick with that?
Well, at this point, I can’t validate the disk image, so there’s that.
Also, it gives me multiple redundancies.
Most of my email folders do not get new email every day. Most of them are just a filing system for information I’m saving. I have 3 email accounts, and so 3 “inbox” style folders, which get email on a regular basis (although only one gets email every day), as well as the Sent folder and Deleted Items folder. Contacts is updated rarely. Calendar is updated almost daily.
I do have a large number of emails filed, but these are mostly static folders and don’t get added to often.
Both differential backups are browse-able within the Acronis interface, so if something went wrong with the 2MB backup, I can’t see it. There was most definitely NOT a huge change from one to the next as to what needed to be backed up. I just don’t get that much email.
This might answer why it takes so long to back up your e-mail:
-Do an incremental backup.
-Run Outlook.
-Send yourself an e-mail to your biggest mailbox that commonly receives mail. Wait for it to arrive.
-Exit Outlook.
-Run an incremental backup again. How long does it take? If it takes 2 hours then that’s because large file(s) are being modified when you receive e-mail. If you have mailboxes with thousands or tens of thousands of messages, consider moving most of them (like maybe 2010 and older) messages to other mailboxes, so the mailbox files being modified with new mail won’t be so large to back up.
Hello all,
Thank you for replying.
Kaio, I will take are of your case.
Just to clarify something for the forum community, how large was your initial full backup?
Best regards,
Anton Deev
Acronis Customer Central
Disk image: 172 GB
File backup: 137 GB
Email backup: 1 GB
The last few email backups have been taking about 10-20 minutes, which is a lot more reasonable (even the ones that produce 400 MB files).
New wrinkle: attempted a manual differential backup of the disk image last night. Seemed to be taking a reasonable amount of time (on the order of 2-ish hours) but the file was nearly the same size as the full backup (it got to about 140-150 GB), and I ran out of space on my backup drive so it couldn’t finish. What’s that about?
…and we’ve come full circle, and the software update won’t download and install. The software freezes once the “progress bar” gets halfway done.
What a fucking waste of money. For $50 I shouldn’t have to spend an hour-plus every single day babysitting this thing.
I use Norton Ghost on Win 7 64. It runs every night and I have occasionally had to restore my back up - it goes rather smoothly (although it seems to take a bit to find my external drive.) I had it on Vista and on XP and have been satisfied with it.
Thanks. One: cost? Same as Acronis? (God knows if Acronis will give me a refund.)
Two: does it have similar backup schemes, ie: can I get a disk image, a file backup, and an Outlook email and settings backup? And can you choose between full, differential, and incremental backups?
BTW, tried to download and install the Acronis update manually. It:
1> failed to intall (fatal error)
2> corrupted my existing installation (if I launched Acronis, my mouse cursor froze, and I couldn’t get it back without rebooting)
3> so I had to rollback to a previous system restore point (Windows, since I couldn’t open Acronis)
4> and had to recreate a few Acronis settings which inexplicably disappeared during the system restore (although hey, my mouse works now)
Total time investment: more than 2 hours. And I’m still running the older version.
I used Norton Ghost for a few years, and actually did some real life restores from backed up images when my machine went through a catastrophic failure. That’s one of the highest marks you can have for backup software, there’s the old saying that backing stuff up is easy, but until you’ve actually had to do a restore you have no idea how valuable the backup is.
But anyway, I switched away from Ghost and to Acronis mostly because of other issues associated with Ghost. For reasons I was never able to troubleshoot, it caused horrific performance issues on my machine (which was very high end at the time) and after working at it for a long time, I just couldn’t resolve them.
I have Acronis TI 2011 and I basically have not had any issues with their “normal” backup procedure. I don’t bother doing a file backup because I can’t really imagine many scenarios where it would be useful. Computers don’t realistically tend to lose just one or two random files, if hard disk fails it has failed and you’ll want to do a full restore. Additionally, those backup images can be mounted and browsed as a virtual drive so you can grab any individual file you need via that route.
My C drive is my OS/applications drive and my D drive is just for storage of various media and other archival purposes. I use the Version Chain backup strategy for my C drive, and I run it every Wednesday at 9 AM (so I’m virtually always going to be at work and won’t need to use the computer.) I do validation on this one every time it runs, and I have it set to email me when it has finished. It’s generally a 100-150 GB backup and I will usually receive an email on my phone around 9:30AM saying it completed and validated, so it takes about half an hour.
My D drive I have set for differential backups, running every Monday at 9:00 AM. With this I have it create a full version after every 5 differential versions and I also have it do a validation and email every time it runs, as well as emailing me notification. Oddly despite it being a differential backup I do notice from looking at my old emails it tends to not finish up until around 10:30 AM, so it seems to actually take longer than the C backup even though that is a version chain backup which to my knowledge is actually a series of full backups. It could just be that the D drive is so much larger (500 GB +) and the validation on it might take much longer, not sure.
I’ve been running this backup system for awhile now, maybe 4-5 months. I used Nonstop Backup at first but no longer use it because I had very little luck with it. The first few days I had Acronis TI installed Nonstop backup worked great. Then it just broke and nothing I could do would fix it. It would start to do its backup, but would just display a message saying “Nonstop Backup Starting” and then it would never start. It didn’t impact my system performance or anything, so I left it alone for a few weeks. But once I confirmed it wasn’t actually doing anything I just killed it. While I’m happy with what I have, my experience with support for the issue I had is the same as Kaio’s, in that it is basically non existent.
So, it appears if you can get TI to work for you it’s great software. I do like it a lot, aside from the one piece that doesn’t work. However, if it doesn’t work, this isn’t the first person I’ve heard of who has had essentially unresolvable problems with the software. The closest I’ve ever heard to an explanation was mentioned up thread here as well, that Acronis has issues with HDD that have any sort of physical problem (minor number of bad sectors or etc) and maybe even specific HDDs from specific manufacturers that can cause their software to break.
Kaio, I can feel your pain, and I think my initial praise for Acronis might have been too early. Inspired by this thread, I finally registered my version of TI at Acronis to be able to download the latest built and updated the program for the first time after 9 months.
The first two times my nightly full backup was done, I was left with a wiped backup folder on my external drive! The logs told me that TI had done a tremendous job, no errors, no warnings, the exact same logs as the previous successful backups. But on the drive: Nada.
The first time I thought it was just a random glitch in the matrix, but after last night’s second failed backup, I deleted the whole backup task and created a new one. Maybe that helps.
It seems, **Kaio **, you’re not alone in having to vent some steam about Acronis.
With the level of problems you’ve had with TI I wouldn’t trust it and I don’t think your problems are easily solvable. My feeling is there is something not right about your hardware or your configuration, or at least something that clashes with TI.
AFAIK Ghost works fine for disk imaging but does not run while the computer runs, you have to reboot into basically DOS mode to run it.
If you just want to back up files, an XCOPY /e /d command can copy anything that’s changed and is incremental backup at it’s simplest. Not the answer you’re looking for but thought I’d throw that out there.
I seriously have no idea what that means.
Aside from Acronis and Ghost, then, is there software out there that does the job in a similar fashion? Disk image (once a month or so), file backups (daily) and email backups (also daily)? User-friendly is a must, I’ve been using Syncback and I seriously have no idea if the thing is backing up everything it’s supposed to be backing up.
And yeah, I’d like to do a serious upgrade/rebuild of my computer, but at this point I still engage in lengthy mental arguments over whether I can afford that $5 pack of cheese, cuz while I need protein, $5 is so expensive. So.
This is why the $50 is pissing me off. That shit comes out of my food budget. And I work from home so data loss could seriously fuck me up.
I use http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp.
Layout looks much the same as Acronis
There is a paid version if you need some of the extras.
CW:)
Just wanted to report back that this did the trick.
sorry, just now saw this.
AAAGGHHH.
So, three weeks later, despite being promised some actual support from Acronis, they have blown off two appointment times, and this thing is still not working. It worked by itself for all of a week, and then since a week ago the file backup failed with errors every single time, and the email backup once again hasn’t been able to complete, even overnight. An Acronis support tech is supposed to be doing a desktop share to troubleshoot all of these problems right now, but no one has contacted me. No one has even told me HOW they would contact me.
Some time ago someone IRL recommended Shadow Protect to me. Does anyone have experience with this software? Does it work well? Does it create a full disk image? Does it do file backups? Can it do email backups? Can it do incremental/differential backups? Are the backups browsable/recoverable on a single-file level? Is there a way to verify/validate that the backups are good?
For email, is there a way to include that in the file backup, or is email and Outlook settings recoverable from a disk image? If Shadow Protect doesn’t have a separate email backup function, I still want to know that I can backup my email/contacts/calendar daily.
Shadow Protect is more expensive than Acronis, so at this point I’m hoping Acronis will agree to fix it or refund my money. In terms of alternate solutions I’m really not sure what to think… I got Acronis based on the great reviews I’d heard about it (review sites consistently rank it at the top), but it’s been a piece of crap for me. I’ve been wrestling with this since the end of November, and I just don’t have that kind of spare time if another piece of software needs to be babied/bullied into compliance. I’ve heard good and bad things about Norton Ghost, and I just don’t want to end up throwing good money after bad trying out software that doesn’t work.
I recommend checking out the trial of Rebit. It does a continuous shadow copy file-based backup of changed files and also lets you do a full system restore. Your e-mail will be backed up with the .pst file and your Outlook account settings are in your user profile.
This thread has been running for some time now and a remark by a previous poster about Acronis fussiness with drives reminded me of my own experience.
I have been using Acronis for some years with no problems till about a couple of months ago when the backup was taking an infinite time and then failed. Long story short it was the drive I was backing up to. The drive it’s self was OK it was the connections that were the problem.
I live in the tropics and because of the humidity in the rain season and the dust in the dry I have to take the computer apart and unplug and clean all the connections a couple of times a year.
After I cleaned the connections on the back up drive Acronis worked fine so as you seemed to have tried just about everything else just try that. Unplug the connections spray them with some contact cleaner and make sure to re-seat them tight.
Have you done a drive check?
On Win XP:- Open My Computer - Right click on your drive - Properties - Tools - “Error-Checking” check the two boxes and let it run.
It will take some time and if you are checking your System “C” drive you’ll need re-boot to start the run.
You could also try http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/index-e.html it’s a free program that will tell you the health of your drives.
There are a couple of other drive check programs 'SpinRite" and “HDD Regenerator” but they cost money
Good luck.
Well, it’s a brand-new drive (purchased at the same time as the software, and thus far only used for Acronis/backups) so I doubt that’s it.
Support called me an hour late. Among other things, he admitted that he didn’t bother to review my case until it was time to call me, which was why he was an hour late; even at that, he only glanced it over and didn’t look at the log files I sent over at all; he attempted to psychoanalyze me because apparently he didn’t like that I didn’t make a verbal response after every sentence (so sorry that I don’t feel a need to chatter/grunt/whatever while he’s clicking around my desktop – ask me a question and I’ll answer, but what am I supposed to say to “I’m going to try this now”? I suspect that “Well, I hope this works” wouldn’t go over well); and at the end, spent more time complaining that his shift was over and he wanted to leave than it took for him to reset the start-up config so it launched my software (including, btw, my anti-virus software) at start-up again. Five minutes bitching about the end of shift, 15 seconds to fix the settings. And, seriously, his first attempt at “fixing” it was to just close the alert window that said start-up was in diagnostic mode, and assure me that everything was back to normal. (I should not have to tell a computer guy that closing an alert does not change the utility settings.) Not to mention that if he’d reviewed my case ahead of time/called me on time, it wouldn’t have been the end of the shift. :rolleyes:
So, I have assurances that now that we’ve uninstalled and reinstalled (twice), and have the latest version of the software, and have deleted all the old Acronis backups and are starting from scratch, that everything will work just peachy now. We’ll see. So far I’ve discovered that Acronis is absolutely incapable of validating the backup at creation – it took over two hours just to get to 8% validated, and slowed my computer to the point where it took five minutes just to switch windows. And it was making my backup drive hot. So I canceled the validation, rebooted, and ran a manual validation. However, both the full image backup, and the manual, post-backup validation seemed to go all right, and both took less time (about 2-2.5 hours) than before.
That got me to like 2am, so I haven’t yet tried the other backups, and I’m reserving judgment til we make it through at least two or three weeks of daily backups without problems.
This is absolutely the last shot, though, so feel free to continue making recommendations for other software. If Acronis starts failing again I’m just asking for my money back. The time spent wrestling it into submission isn’t worth it.
Just curious: is there a good reason why this software sounds like the name of someone from a Harry Potter novel?