Acronis True Image 10 destroyed my hardware RAID 1

Motherboard: 965P-DS4, windows xp x64.

I have two Seagate SATA disks connected on ICH8R chipset (with AHCI enabled), these disks are C and D, and 2 Maxtor disks on Gigabyte SATA2 controller with hardware RAID 1 enabled and functional - disk E (2 disks - mirroring).

I wanted to restore system partition C with previously created whole partition backup lying on D disk (tib file).

Restoration was succesfull, but somehow TI managed to DEGRADE my hardware RAID1 on WHOLE other controller and disk it should not have bussines with. No harm is done, but rebuild took me ~4 hours of time!

What could have gone wrong? Some kind of driver support lack? Should I unplug disks that are not involved in Acronis process?

There is one thing I noticed while Acronis loaded in "dos" mode. Couple of "hde interupt failed" messages before it proceed with restoration.

Please feedback.

 

Hate to say this - mainly because it may be perceived as the start of a flame war when it isnt - but raid mirroring really hasnt been a good answer in any situation, ultimately. I have seen installations where the main drive died physically actually kill off many mirrored backups instead of just switching to them.

The better idea has always been something like TI. So, my answer to you is that whatever caused the problem that needed the restoration may well have caused some other problem on the drive being mirrored to before you even started a restore.

 

So, what do you suggest? Some kind of folder SYNC program? Clone disk? Sheduled task?

I really need to have that data stored/hold with redundancy. Data is relatively dynamic (changes on daily basis).

 

And also, I forgot to mention. There was no "problem" with OS and any other disk drives whatsoever. I test new developing tools and programs on daily basis, so I wanted to revert on my OS backup with instalation of software that takes about 2 hours since TI recovery takes just 10.

 

Hello nik718,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that we have not heard about such problems of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home before and so we would like to investigate this one with your assistance, if you have time for this of course.

Please note that in order to provide you with the information on what causes the issue you have described we would need some additional information from you. Note that this process may require you to reproduce the issue.

First, please clarify the following:

- Have you created the image of the entire hard drive or image of the system partition only?

- Have you restored the image of the entire hard drive or image of the system partition only?

- Did you restore the image to its initial location or to another partition?

- Did you use Acronis True Image Bootable Rescue Media or did you use Acronis True Image in Windows to restore the image archive?

In addition, please describe the exact step-by-step actions taken to restore the image archive.

Please create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post.

Once the issue reproduced, please create a new Acronis Report and name it report_after.txt, for example.

Having collected the above information please submit a request for technical support. Attach all the collected files and information to your request along with the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with a solution.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

Thanks for response. I will try to answer your questions.

I have 4 hard disks connected on that motherboard (965p-ds4). Two of them are connected on Intel ICH8R controller (AHCI enabled), and two of them are on GSATA2 RAID controller (IDE/RAID enabled) with proper configuration of hardware RAID in mode 1.

There is only ONE partition per disk on first two disks, and only ONE partititon on RAID array.

I made an image of the entire disk and stored its image on other disk (from disk C with tib file goding on disk D - both of these disks are connected on ICH8R).

The recovery was also entire disk on its initial position (C disk), over Actonis TI in Windows (Windows is XP x64), and recovery was 100% succesful. The only side-effect is that the Acronis process degraded RAID. I also noticed before restoration begun, while still in the windows, that there was short message "locking partition E" (partition on RAID), and I presume something went wrong in that part of the restore execution.

Unfortuately, I dont have time nor will to compose step-by-step technical request since I have other (older and trusted) backup solutions in power right now. Acronis TI 10 way just clean system tryout based on its popularity and obviously (over)praised functionality.

Nik

 

Depends entirely upon your need where you are but for instance, you can make up a task in TI10 to go off each hour. Eg, make up 24 tasks each to do incremental backups. That way you would lose an hour in that scenario but you wouldnt lose more (excepting if the backup drive also karked it but just how far do you go with backups? That depends on your place's needs).

 

I dont want to make tasks in TI, and I dont want to lose processors time and power on incremental backups tasks and setting 3th party aplication to pick on "open" files. The idea is RAID1. Thats why it is invented, no?

I work with multimedia (vector graphics ets), and handle big files. Write/read performance is not of issue, since I click save on full project every 10 up to 30 minutes, so I really love RAID1 concept on that matter. Live redundancy at its best. No need for backup/tasks/3th party aplication etc etc.

So, the thing is that the fact I have RAID on the PC should not have anything to do with my ocational need to restore OS partition (whole disk) with image that contains mastodont aplication instalation (or any other reason should it comeup with hardware error excluded) that takes up 2-3 hours to install and therefore I think it is natural to expect that such backup/restore aplication does not degrade hardware context it is run upon.