Check your Backups, they might not have backed up all!! - Bug in True Image Home 2009

Take a look at the following screencast, it shows how you might have left some data out of your backup without knowing.

The content selector leaves much to be desired, it is buggy in a couple of different ways. (Other than that TrueImage Home is really cool)

The content selector needs additional icons, one which shows which data will be forcefully excluded.

Also, if you select a folder, then deselect it, and later delete a child folder, the backup will tell you that a folder is missing even if it has never been directly selected...

http://digitalfabrikate.de/trueimage/

 

nice demo, BTW.

This kind of thing is exactly why I don't bother with anything other than full partition image backups. From the reports on this forum I'm not sure I can trust all the various convenience features of ATI, and the time spent managing it just isn't worth it.

 

Yes, having followed your example, I get exactly that result too. Thanks for pointing it out.

Have you sent your screen cast to Acronis Support?
I'm certainly not getting much in the way of meaningful response from them on another issue (maybe the department has been disbanded or scaled back due to the current economic downturn), but if they are not made aware of all the problems, then I guess the problems will never be fixed.

 

Yes I have submitted it to Tech Support just prior to posting it here.

Actually the idea behind ATI is really great, the only problem I see is this selection mechanism, which, while it looks nice, is terribly buggy. The bug shown in the screencast actually shows you that there is no way for you to make corrections in your selection, which is a quite dramatic bug.

I still have not much real world experiece with the backups, they seem to work.

A selection mechanism similar to a program called "PowerGREP" would be exactly what ATI needs to be just perfect.

In PowerGREP folders can have different states besides "selected" or "not selected". There you can

1. when right-clicking on a folder:
- Include folder
- Include folder and subfolders
- Exclude folder
- Clear folder
- Clear folder and its files and subfolders

2. when right-clicking on a file:
- Include file
- Exclude file
- Clear file

Only this combination allows you to clearly define the actions taken upon a file or folder, and since ATI does ONLY support
- Include file or folder and subfolders
- Exclude file or folder and subfolders
you cannot built a complex selection based upon logical reasoning.

If you select "Documents and Settings", you include everything contained in it. This is logical. If you then deselect "Documents and Settings", then it appears that a list is created which excludes every folder in Doc&Sett. The logical step would be to just clear "Documents and Settings" and all it's subfolders and files. Here's the proof:

If you select "Documents and Settings", then deselect it, then delete any folder which resides in "Documents and Settings" run the task, you get a warning that deleted folder is no longer existing. You can then ignore the warning and continue with the execution of the task. But the correct behaviour would be not to notify the user because it should be irrelevan if the deleted folder exists or not since the inclusion in the backup had been removed by deselecting "Documents and Settings".

So effectively, instead of clearing the selection it forcefully (or explicitly) excluded it from the backup, so that during the processing of the batch job there still exists a reference to that deleted folder (and thus the warning).

This may also explain why the stuff in the screencast happens: when the "Documents and Settings" gets cleared, then an entry is added into a list which says "Don't backup c:\Doc&Sett". When you then select a subfolder for backup, it actually does not get backed up, because "c:\Doc&Sett" is marked as "Do not backup", so ATI does not even bother to check if a subfolder should actually be backed up.

This really seems to have been programmed by an amateur. My recommendation: ATI-Team go and check out how the problem is solved in PowerGREP, since they have done it perfectly.

 

One of the two biggest probs with ATI is that theey jsut don't do enough debugging and errorhandling work when they release a product. They send a new version out every year whether it's a finished product or not. Regretably, this has resulted in ATI11 and ATI12/2009 having embarassing probs like this.

 

What is the other one?

 

It depends on what you want Acronis to do - personally I only want it to do full image backup jobs and have no interest in data or email backups. I have tried them in previous versions of TI and they have always been problematic. Speaking for myself I have found TI 2009 the best ever product to date - it certainly is for my hardware Vista environment.

I have a Maxtor OneTouch 4 which has data backup software and I use this to do a daily backup of data only. I find the two together to be the perfect backup solution.

 

Up to this day no single word from their support team...

 

Great screencast indeed.

Anyways - I stumbled onto this problem too but have not had time to report it yet. It is clear if you look at the task script itself. It's located under C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Scripts

If you look at the respective task, you'll see that it contains both the Include for the dirs you want, but also an upper-level Exclude.

Really silly that they'd get pinched for something like this.

 

This is an important bug. Great job demonstrating the bug. There are spelling mistakes in the manual and on screen so its just another sign that quality control and testing is not taking place.

 

The linux used for restores too often hasn't the right hardware drivers. That's probably the number one issue (ATI11 and it's myriad coding bugs notwithstanding).

 

Imo, the fact that a software program works when you avoid it's bugs doesn't really excuse the bugs when they are critical faults in fundamental features of the program.

Even the dreaded ATI11 could be used by some without suffering (too much) it's many errant ways -- but you had to use it very narrowly and then ignore osme of the sillier things, like some of the alerts. ATI12/2009 is much cleaned up compared to 11 but still, Acronis doing annual releases is clearly not giving Acronis enough time to do the testing, debugging, and coding for error handling that it should for the key features to work as advertised.

 

Cannot try this at the moment - on a different system for a few days!

Is the deselection list associated with the individual job? If so, presumably, if you delete the job and re-create it (just selecting what you want), then you should be OK!

FWIW, I use the recovery disk to do a full backup to either another spare internal disk or a removable external USB disk twice per month on Fridays. Also do it again just before a "big" upgrade - eg.WINxp SP2 -> SP3. This is safer and much faster than doing it under XP.

All I backup daily are files in Docs'n'Settings plus a couple of other regularly changing data folders. So if files get overwritten, I can restore them quickly from a small .TIB but if the system gets wrecked, I recover from the latest full + latest files.

It works (using TI11 but not yet tested using 2009) - my disk failed last summer but nothing was lost!

Rog

 

Hello df75,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for delayed response.

Thank you for reporting that problem. Could you please let us know your Acronis request number (e.g. [Acronis #123456]) which was sent to you in autoreply to your letter? I will make sure it reaches the responsible person. If you have not received an autoreply then please send us a Private Message containing your e-mail address.

Thank you.
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