All my images are corrupted!

Thanks for NOTHING, Acronis.. ....

Very disappointed.

Made one main image and 6 or 7 incrementals. Verified each one.. No problem.

When I went to restore, Corrupted image.. on an external HD (FAT32)

Using ver 11 on Vista Home Premium, what a waste.

Can I have my money back, please?

I don't even know if I want your help.. I am SO exhausted. I have to wait until Friday now for Gateway to send me system restore disks .. Just to get my system working. You can bet I'm not gonna reinstall Acronis TI 11 again!

 

Always important to do a test restore (Or go theorugh all of the steps to set up a restore) before relying on a backup imaging program. All of them have problems with some hardware set ups and that's the only way to know for sure.

I fyou have access to another machine, yhou can try creating a VistaPE or BartPE bootDisk with acronis on it and probably be able to use the backup files you now have.

 

I already bought another drive imaging program. I've had it.. With Versions 5 through 8 never really had any issues. It seems with ver 10 and up the dependability of Acronis went out the window. I know, it's the customer's fault.

So long Acronis. I should have burned my money instead...

 

I hope you take the time to do a test restore with that one. It would be a shame to get burned twice for failing to do so.

 

Can you suggest a procedure for performing a test restore without actually having to overwrite the destination to prove that it works?

 

Only one chance to test a restore: Use a spare disk.

 

No you have a second choice, restore in a VM (VirtualPC 2007 is for free, VMWare Server also...)
You can boot on ISO, and test fully

 

Nice idea .

Hm, can I have more than one partition in a VM?

EDIT1:
...considering about this...
If you have an image with e.g. 200GB it becomes difficult to restore it under VM.
The VM-disk-size then have to be very large...
(or you use a spare disk under VM. But then you can test it without VM )

 

The likely thing that happened with the original poster of this thread is that he did a validate using Windows and not surprisingly thought all was well. The problem is that the restore environment either when the restore is started within Windows or from the rescue CD is Linux. The problem with this is that the drivers may not adequately support your hardware, typically the newer hardware.

The test restore is definitely the best mechanism but if you don't want to do it then boot up the TI rescue CD and validate the archive using the Linux environment. This will demonstrate that TI can properly read the archive contents and the Linux environment does run on your PC.

After you've done this sucessfully then you can have more confidence in the Windows validation because you know the Linux environment does work with your hardware.

As mentioned by another poster, the original poster can likely recover his archive using a Bart/VistaPE CD since it uses Windows components rather than Linux.

 

See SeekForever's comments on validating from the TI Rescue CD. That's not as perfect as restoring to a replacement hard drive, but in my experience if that works, the restore works also.

 

I'm considering recommending the server version of TI to one of my clients. He has a Dell PowerEdge server running Small Business Server 2003. His server is equipped with a Dell PERC SCSI RAID controller, with 6 drives configured in a RAID 5 array. I will set up TI to save images to a USB hard drive. I understand that if I boot the server using the TI recovery CD and run a validate/verify on the images located on the USB drive, I can be very confident that TI will be able to read those images in the event I need to do a bare metal restore. In fact, I suppose I could do a test restore to a 2nd USB hard drive. However, how confident can I be that it will be able to write the image to the PERC SCSI RAID array? Testing this on a server with identical hardware is not practical. If my client lays out 600 or 700 dollars for a recovery solution, then discovers when he needs it most that it is incompatible with his hardware...nuf said. Does Acronis certify their products to be compatible with vendor hardware? Is their a Harware Compatibility List for Acronis's Recovery CD? Any suggestions on how to deal with this catch22?

 

I have the DELL with the PERC controller. I can tell you that Acronis supports this hardware. I have reinstalled a number of times, most recently 2 months ago when I change the hard drives to larger ones. Acronis restored my 3 logical drives with no problems.