Acronis deletes restore points and disables system restore

Correction: Acronis doesn't delete restore points and disable system restore

I tried creating a full disk back up of my C: drive directly to DVD with Acronis True Image Home. This ended in failure when Acronis tried to verify the back up and complained that it failed to read the file. Now I find that I can't restore from any of my restore points and the data size on my hard drive is reduced by 0.45GB. Although system restore will go through the moves of successfully creating a restore point, I can't restore from it either.

Is there any way to get back a functioning system restore, other than doing a fresh install of XP and all my other software?

 

Hi jb098 welcome to Wilders

If it doesn't matter if you lose the previous restore points you could try turning off system restore then reboot and turn back on.

 

This is a new problem attributed to using True Image. What version and build number of True Image is it? What operating system are you using?

I doubt you'll have to completely reinstall XP though. What Tex said should work. If it doesn't just do a Repair install of the OS. This way you wouldn't have to reinstall all your apps.

 

In TI there is a manage system restore wizard. If this has been run and system restore has been turned off what you have experienced is expected behaviour. a solution is to go back and re-enable system restore.
Or do what texcritter has advised.

Xpilot

 

Thanks for the welcome Tex.

OS is XP SP2, TI is Home version 10.0 (build 4,942).

I haven't used the TI manage system restore wizard. TI was unable to read the back up file from the DVD when it tried to verify so the backup session was aborted without completing. My geuss is that my system restore problem was caused by whatever TI does to lock the disk not being undone because the back up session was aborted. I'm hoping some one can tell me how to unlock the disk in this case.

Windows Explorer on the affected PC can not read the back up file from the DVD burner either. The DVD drives in my other PC can see the file and I have copied it to my hard drive on that machine. I can mount and verify the image over the network with TI on the 1st PC. I can see that the restore points exist in the back up image.

On the affected PC Explorer says the file system on the back up DVD is CDFS, ISObuster and Nero InfoTool see no media present. On ther other PC it's reported by Explorer as UDF. ISObuster sees only ISO9660 and Joliet, Nero InfoTool sees ISO9660-Joliet-UDF.

Later on, unless I get a better suggestion, and before trying to reboot, I'm going to try going through the entire back up process again, only this time backing up to hard drive to see if completing the process will unlock the drive.

 

I don't think TI had anything to do with System Restore failing. System Restore is notorious for failing to restore. It's my opinion that unless you regularly delete old Restore Points in DiskCleanup, it will never work on a computer that is more than a couple of months old. An even better approach is to go into the Control Panel, System icon and turn System Restore off. Reboot and then go back and turn System Restore back on. Then it might just work.

You could also try copying your backup image from the DVD disk(s) onto a hard drive. Try validating it from there. It will be much faster, and sometimes this works when the file can't be restored from the DVD disks.

Backing up to a hard drive is much better than using DVDs. It's faster and more reliable.

 

I now see I was mistaken in believing TI deleted restore points and diabled system restore. I was able to actually go back to a restore point in the usual way. The reason I believed my restore points were gone is because they weren't showing up in WinTools.net Professional as was the case when I lost them and they ability to create them on another occasion. I've since discovered they do not show up in WinTools even if there's no problem with system restore on either of my machines.

The previous time I lost system restore I at first attributed to antivirus software on the same machine and software set up. After a fresh Install of XP and apps sans antivirus I tried TI for only the second time and experienced the failure because it was unable to verify I reported in my original post. I checked in WinTools because of the difference I noticed in size of the data on the hard drive that I noted and just assumed the same thing had happened a second time. I didn't even try actually doing a restore. I'm sorry to have mislead anyone.

I think the failure to read the TI created DVD in this PC may be because of the limited abilities of the DVDburner which is an early model - NEC ND-1100A. I can only geuss that I misread the size of the data on the hard drive in explorer before I tried making a back up with TI.

 

Thank you for clearing this up. Often people discover their own misunderstanding but don't let us know. You are one of the good guys.

 

If you are using fairly new DVD's to backup to it is not the burner's fault. Since that burner is real old no firmware has been written for it so that it would be able to write the DVD's correctly using the DVD's MID Code. Unless you are using old blank media then the burner can not burn the data correctly. Just replace that burner w/ a newer DVD burner and update that firmware to the correct version and it should burn the disk correctly if the TI program can write to the disk properly. You really would be better off w/ a USB external drive.

 

I've used it successfully to "restore" on a PC several years old and without doing any manual deletes. Of course, Sys Restore, as designed, deletes old resotre points as it's allocated disk space becomes full.

You can adjsut the amount of space that Sy Restore uses and don't need to bother with doing "dskcleanups" to limit it.

Using Diskcleanup to remove restore points is more aptly appplied when you need more disk space in a hurry and are willing to sacrifice the restore points. It's not something you should have to do to control the nubmer of restore points.

 

My point was that more people have experienced failures with System Restore than have had success. It's a wonderful tool when it works, but it fails so often that it's not very useful.

Cleaning out old Restore Points appears to improve the likelihood that System Restore will work.

 

The earlier advice to copy your DVDs to the HDD is a good one. It worked for me, and restored perfectly even though validation on the DVDs themselves failed. Validation on the HDD succeeded.

Don't use burning software like Nero to copy those DVDs. It changes them somehow and ATI will say they're not valid backup files. Just use Windows Explorer. And be sure to put all the files in the same directory so ATI can find the ones it needs after you click the last one.

By the way, this is the ONLY way to try to restore individual files from DVD image files. If you try it from the discs, you could be swapping DVDs literally hundreds, and possibly thousands of times ( I wish the manual had given me a clue before I attempted that).