Do you use Acronis 2018?
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I can only say that we have abandonned Acronis several years ago because we had numerous issues with their products, both for physical and virtual environments (backup failures, corrupted backups, inconsistencies). Their support team was of a quite good will and kindness, but unfortunately was not able to solve all the problems our customers encountered. We even lost a couple of them, some of the most important to us, due to these issues, so we decided to switch to another editor (we now use Veeam products for backups everywhere, and we are quite satisfied with them). But, as I said, it was several years ago (three or four), so they may have corrected their issues (I hope they did).
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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I can only say that we have abandonned Acronis several years ago because we had numerous issues with their products, both for physical and virtual environments (backup failures, corrupted backups, inconsistencies). Their support team was of a quite good will and kindness, but unfortunately was not able to solve all the problems our customers encountered. We even lost a couple of them, some of the most important to us, due to these issues, so we decided to switch to another editor (we now use Veeam products for backups everywhere, and we are quite satisfied with them). But, as I said, it was several years ago (three or four), so they may have corrected their issues (I hope they did).
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
Backups are important, and there is data and then there is the OS disk. The time to install all of the s/w is of real value, so when someone claims they can image a hot drive, it gets my attention. Pretty aggressive claim - IMHO.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I use Acronis at home. I use an old version and can only reliably image the C drive disk(i.e. OS disk) by booting from an Acronis DVD. Yes it's technically possible to do a 'hot' image however I discovered, to my chagrin, that the images built this way were always corrupted which is why I always select the verify option nowadays. I lost a lot of data because of this. Things may have changed in the meantime, however I don't know how you can image a disk on which the software and OS are currently running without some fairly major magic going on.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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I use Acronis at home. I use an old version and can only reliably image the C drive disk(i.e. OS disk) by booting from an Acronis DVD. Yes it's technically possible to do a 'hot' image however I discovered, to my chagrin, that the images built this way were always corrupted which is why I always select the verify option nowadays. I lost a lot of data because of this. Things may have changed in the meantime, however I don't know how you can image a disk on which the software and OS are currently running without some fairly major magic going on.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
"without some fairly major magic going on" there is a phrase that can be universally applied to just about any serious claim :). I'm going to pull the trigger on another m2 drive and give it a go. If it works, it would be a huge time savings for me. dang - price went up on this little beasty....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
If I were that worried about recreating state for an entire machine quickly, I'd just use a VM. Tada... problem solved. For everything else there's Mastercard xcopy.
Jeremy Falcon
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If I were that worried about recreating state for an entire machine quickly, I'd just use a VM. Tada... problem solved. For everything else there's Mastercard xcopy.
Jeremy Falcon
True, in general, but I've found that there are little things with the VM (I use VMWare Workstation) that annoy me. However, it would be a useful exercise to pull the existing disk into a VM to see how it plays....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Backups are important, and there is data and then there is the OS disk. The time to install all of the s/w is of real value, so when someone claims they can image a hot drive, it gets my attention. Pretty aggressive claim - IMHO.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I've imaged hot drives with acronis for years. Restored them on more than one occasion and hit the ground running. I've had my problems but have worked through them. We use it today.
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True, in general, but I've found that there are little things with the VM (I use VMWare Workstation) that annoy me. However, it would be a useful exercise to pull the existing disk into a VM to see how it plays....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
:thumbsup:
Jeremy Falcon
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I use their 2017 edition, and have been using them since 2015. I have had occasion to recover both the entire system drive and sets of files from a backup, and it worked in all cases like a charm. I understand that it uses the "shadow copy" mechanism for the backup, so it can take a snapshot of the drive at a paticular instant. However, I set the backup process to run when I'm not using the computer, so I don't know if this really stresses the backup system. Being paranoid, I've set it to verify the backup after every backup. No problems reported, yet. EDIT: I don't use VMs very often, so I have no idea how Acronis handles imaging of live VMs.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
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Backups are important, and there is data and then there is the OS disk. The time to install all of the s/w is of real value, so when someone claims they can image a hot drive, it gets my attention. Pretty aggressive claim - IMHO.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
charlieg wrote:
Pretty aggressive claim - IMHO
It is not, or at least not intended to be. I just wanted to share my experience, which I won't forget anytime soon, considering the consequences we had to face - my company lost customers, and I ended with an useless Acronis certification. I sincerely hope they have been able to solve all their issues.
"I'm neither for nor against, on the contrary." John Middle
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Haven't tried the newest version but I had to revert to the 2013 version. The product has gone to crap.
Someone's therapist knows all about you!
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I use their 2017 edition, and have been using them since 2015. I have had occasion to recover both the entire system drive and sets of files from a backup, and it worked in all cases like a charm. I understand that it uses the "shadow copy" mechanism for the backup, so it can take a snapshot of the drive at a paticular instant. However, I set the backup process to run when I'm not using the computer, so I don't know if this really stresses the backup system. Being paranoid, I've set it to verify the backup after every backup. No problems reported, yet. EDIT: I don't use VMs very often, so I have no idea how Acronis handles imaging of live VMs.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
Imaging virtual machines is trivial. You just copy the container file. I use VMs, and I have done the copy operations. Jeremy has a good idea there.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Backups are important, and there is data and then there is the OS disk. The time to install all of the s/w is of real value, so when someone claims they can image a hot drive, it gets my attention. Pretty aggressive claim - IMHO.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Using Macrium's Reflect I often make perfect images of my system drive, while I continue working. It has never failed me. I always verify each image when it's complete. I believe Reflect take a "snapshot" of the drive when it starts, so it can deal with changes on the fly. However, I never save data on my systems drive. I have a dedicated drive for data, so there is little writing to the systems drive when I work.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Imaging virtual machines is trivial. You just copy the container file. I use VMs, and I have done the copy operations. Jeremy has a good idea there.
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
If the VM is running, it may be more difficult - part of the VM's state may be in memory, rather than on the disk.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
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If the VM is running, it may be more difficult - part of the VM's state may be in memory, rather than on the disk.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack. --Winston Churchill
Oh sure, didn't mean to imply one would copy a live virtual machine - that would be bad. :)
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
It is terrible! Run, run, run as fast as you can away from that product.
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I use 2018, and have been an Acronis user for years. I do NOT trust any live image copy, but the boot from CDROM copies have always worked. I upgraded both my SSDs recently in my laptop. I use their backup, and have not had any issues with restoring, and rebooting the stored images. (I have a spare duplicate laptop I fire up, and do full restores to, from LIVE backups, and using the CDROM to boot from. I feel it is the only way to know your backups work). I no longer run ORACLE or MSSQL on my HD (all in VMs now). I have MySQL running locally, but nothing using it in the background. To me, DB systems have the highest risk of screaming about corruption. Oracle uses a syncronized time stamp inside the files. If you try to startup with a single files timestamp wrong... Good luck! (which is a good thing)... YMMV... But I am happy with Acronis. I am NOT happy with their cloud storage PRICING, and had to move a customer away from that.
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Hi, I have been using Acronis for a while, but dumped them because I was not able to recover properly from an image. My portable at that time used part of a mSATA SSD to cache OS files, and my guess was that Acronis can't handle that. I contacted the tech support, and only got vague responses. Then I switched to ToDo Backup Workstation. I once had an issue with another software from them (EaseUS) called Partition Master, and tech support has been very helpful in resolving the issue.
Gilles Plante
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Looking for fellow users of Acronis Backup. The new 2018 version claims to support full image backup (while machine is live). Looking for anyone who has actually used the product....
Charlie Gilley <italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape... "Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783 “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
I am still using the 2017 version, but I will probably upgrade in due course. Acronis had some fairly major issues a few years ago (?2013ish) around data corruption in backups and other problems, but my experiences with the last couple of versions have been good. I use it primarily for image backup of my system drives - I use CrashPlan Pro for my documents, because the latter utility handles versioning much better.
