Acronis TI Home 10 Crashing Upon Backup Attempts

I can no longer perform any backups with TI Home 10.

It was working OK up until about mid-September. That is when I had some unrelated (at least hopefully unrelated!) disk problems. First a Seagate external USB HDD failed on me. Not sure what the problem was but it started heating up even more than normal (Seagate USB Drives and Coolmax drive cases seem to have high heat to start with), and finally XP would or could not access the drive any longer. Also, an internal Seagate drive failed shortly thereafter. The PC was custom-built by Falcon-Northwest and was under warranty, so after some memory tests (memtest86+) and drive tests (Hitachi Drive Fitness test) a replacement was sent out by Falcon-NW. I installed the drive and also purchased a new Western Digital external USB drive. Finally all set to start imaging with TI Home 10 again.

However now TI Home 10 cannot complete a backup. Actually it cannot even start a backup!

I created two Backup Locations using the Acronis Wizard - all OK there, it appeared. And then I started a backup session. I started the Backup Wizard, selected the source drives (to be backed up), and then as soon as I select either Backup Location Acronis immediately crashes with the following error message found in the Application Event Viewer:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Application Error
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1000
Date: 11/3/2007
Time: 1:03:50 AM
User: N/A
Computer: XXXXXXXX (My computer name, hidden here)
Description:
Faulting application trueimage.exe, version 10.0.0.4942, faulting module dopushlp.dll, version 1.0.0.11, fault address 0x0000f377.


The "faulting module" appears to be a DLL belonging to Directory Opus - a Windows Explorer replacement that I purchased and installed recently. Directory Opus was installed on 08/28/2007, and Acronis TI Home 10 was still backing up just fine until 09/12/2007. The internal disk failure occurred on 09/13/2007. Well, actually the disk apparently had errors/bad sectors for at least a couple of months prior to the actual failure, but they were not serious enough to be noticed until the drive pretty much failed on 09/13/2007.

The reason for the dates is that at first I thought that perhaps I had installed Directory Opus after the disk failed and therefore any conflicts between DOpus and Acronis TI Home 10 only occurred after I started using TI Home 10 again. But it does seem that they worked together just fine for two weeks before the drive failure, so obviously they can usually run together OK.

I submitted a support request earlier but probably will not get a response for a few days yet - normally seems to take 3-4 days or longer to hear anything from Acronis Support after submitting a request. So I thought I would post this here and see if anyone has seen this before, or if any TI gurus here might have a good idea what could be causing this issue.

I am running Acronis TI Home 10 Build 4249 on a PC running Windows XP Professional w/ SP2. If any additional specs are needed please let me know.

Thanks in advance for any help or advice.

Jim

 

Where have you pointed your backup archive to?

By default it goes on to your C: drive under one of the normally hidden system folders.

If your primary partition (C: drive) is near full, then I have found with TI11 and with the Server versions, that you will get some strange error messages and everything falls over.

I also use Dopus - and haven't had any problems with it and TI9 or 11.

Colin

 

Default Backup Archive? No such thing here.

First, my C: rive is not near full. 49% free. Secondly, there are NO backup locations created by default. From the nav table on the left of the Home screen I click on Backup Locations, and then on the main pane, I click on "Create a Backup Location". None exist before that.

Possibly you mean that if you try to start a backup job without creating a formal Acronis Backup Location it automatically sends it to C:? I wouldn't know. I always create a few Backup Locations so that my rotating backups are automatically deleted as new are created.

Thanks.

Jim

 

Hmm, OK - I'll go have another look at TI11 - Enterprise does default to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Acronis as an archive location - which cannot be deleted, though others can take it's place - maybe that is due to backup server utility.

I wonder if either snapapi or maybe the TISfilter.sys has become corrupted? As drive info is kept in registry and your problem started after a drive played up, maybe corrupt info is in registry. Are you using v9.009 of DOPUS?

If you uninstall DOpus does TI10 behave itself - I doubt it, but might be worth narrowing down whether there is a DOpus problem with TI10 or if TI10 is up the spout.

Does mounting an image work OK, both from within TI and from the mount option by right clicking on the tib file?

Colin

Have you tried uninstalling and re-installing TI10?

 

Yes - 9.09

I haven't found anyone else who has seen or knows of any conflicts between TI and DOpus, so I think I will leave DOpus alone for the time being. Don't want to lose a lot of customization just to test this unless all else fails to show anything.

Mount it where? Remember, I don't have any recent image - latest was 09/12/2007. I would lose a lot if I mounted that, correct? I read a lot about people mounting images just to check things and I never understand exactly what they are doing. Overwriting all their current data with an older image?

I definitely need to know more about this before trying it. Shouldn't fly into it blind! As you can see, I do a lot of backing up, but not restoring! Good that I haven't really needed to restore, but then again I'm lost as far as what exactly to do.

No, but since I now have TI Home 11, should I bother to uninstall/reinstall TI 10 t this point? Just to find out what was going wrong?

Or should I just uninstall TI 10 and then install TI 11?

BTW, other than uninstalling TI 10 first, is there any type of Acronis "cleanup" utility that I should run first?

Thanks.

Jim

 

1. Mounting an image provides you with a virtual harddrive or partition (depends on how you look at it). It will appear in any file manager with a spare drive letter of your choosing - I normally start at Z and work backwards.

This is not the same as restoring an image.

Once the image is mounted, you can copy files, from the 'virtual' drive onto your physical drives and partitions. Make sure you choose READ mode only, this means you can't copy anything to your image drive. In dopus, the drive will icon will look a little like a network drive icon - just attempting to mount an image won't change anything on your physical drives. Though not advisable, if you were to mount the image and then switch the computer off, the image drive would disappear on reboot.

As far as to installing TI11 I'd be 50/50 on what to do - if you don't solve the problem with TI10 then there is no guarantee that the problem won't 'port' itself over to TI 11 - OTOH, installing TI 11 might solve the problem,a nd save an awful lot of fiddling. If you do decide to install TI 11, then definitely uninstall TI 10, I would also make sure that any tasks and schedules are located and either deleted or have their *.tis file ending renamed plus delete any instance in TI in registry - this would give you the cleanest slate possible from TI 10.

And then install 11 - not forgetting you'll need your 10 licence no. as well as your 11 if the v11 is an upgrade version.

Alternatively you could just install 11 over the top, and if it works bingo, but just be prepared that you might need to go through the above if you are not so lucky.

Colin