Acronis Backup Settings

[dcb]

Would those of you using Acronis TI mind sharing your backup settings? I have been a happy Acronis user in the past but now only use it for a full disk image monthly for recovery (which incidentally I did have to resort to yesterday). My daily backups are handled now by Crashplan which has the advantage of running constantly, backing up locally to a connected USB drive, over the network and to the cloud. However, backups of the database file restored from Crashplan are unusable. I think it's because at some point it's trying to backup an open file.

I've looked at the Nonstop backup option but that only works on the internal drive. No good as I'm now running the IMatch database of a USB 3.0 stick (fastest 'drive' on the system). Are the TI users working with Nonstop backup or a daily, hourly disk and partition backup?

[Photon]

I was using Acronis TrueImage 2012 and upgraded to 2013 with high expectations.
In total I experienced too much limitations, crashs and lack of flexibility (e.g. for encrypted drives, logical drives, ...).
That is why I changed back to some other tools for manual and automatic backup (versioned, realtime, one-time-copy).

May be something like a hard, symbolic or other link on your internal drive directing to the external USB drive can help you?
I am using such methods quite often (e.g. for Lightroom catalogues), but this has to be investigated (tested) individually.
With some advanced backup tools there are also settings to enable/disable the following of such linked files or directories.

[JohnZeman]

About a month ago I downloaded and installed the latest version of Acronis True Image to try it out.  The installation must have been corrupt because the program gave me "failed to launch" errors any time I tried to do anything with it.  So after being prompted to I rebooted but the computer wouldn't boot up at all after that.  Long story short the installation had apparently corrupted the boot sector of my hard drive, but fortunately I had a 3 week old cloned copy of my C: drive so I was able to get back to speed again although with some lost data. 

The Acronis free migration software that comes with new certain brand name hard drives works just fine.  So ironically the professional version of Acronis True Image destroyed my hard drive but their free disk migration software saved me.

Needless to say I did not purchase True Image. 

[Mario]

I use the 2010 version of TrueImage with success. Never bothered to update because they did not add new core features, just secondary stuff not directly related to the basic task of backing up data.

I use TI as the second of your layers in my data backup strategy, where the first are RAID drives and the fourth are cloud services.

[Ferdinand]

I am still using version 11 of ATI, which I think was the version before 2010, i.e. before they first started using years to indicate version numbers.  I bought the 2013 version last year during a sale, and also got a free upgrade to 2014.  But I haven't installed either in a production system.  Doing so takes some time and effort, as I would want to be sure that I can restore and not run into problems like John did.  This means using a clone of my C: drive for testing.  I can't be bothered when what I have works well.  I did make an attempt when I was building my W7 system a year ago and had trouble getting it to work, and decided not to spend the time.

(I have a theory, which is not really tested, but is based on occasionally reading the Acronis forums.  When version 201x is released it is full of bugs.  Progressively they are ironed out, but by the time they mostly are, they release the next year's program, which is full of new bugs and you can't then buy 201x.  So my plan in buying 2013 was to use it some time later when it was stable, but no longer available.  You can always go and download the updates for older versions, even if you can no longer buy the program.)

To answer your question directly, I take a full backup of my system on my external 2Tb e-SATA drive.  This is around 1.1Tb.  I then take incremental backups each night before shutdown.  These are typically around 2Gb and take about 7 minutes to complete.  I have a duplicate of this drive that I copy the increments to occasionally that I keep off site.  Over time the increments take longer and get larger, and at this point I put one of these two drives aside as long term backup and start the process afresh with the other drive plus a new drive.  So I always have at least two copies of the current backups plus one of the old.  (And in fact some from before that as well, going back years.)

I prefer to shut down most programs before I take my increments, and certainly programs that create temporary files for their edits to open "documents", like MS Word and IMatch etc.  I think the backup still works if programs are open, by locking the drive, but what's the point of backing up the IMatch DB with all those temporary roll-back files still there? 

Since I don't run one of the newer versions of the program I can't comment on any newer features like continuous backup.  In any case I prefer to keep my backup drives completely unplugged when not in use, since I don't want a power surge or lightening  strike to take out both my PC and backups.

[dcb]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. Backups are a juggle between time, space ($) and from reported experiences software as well. I need to rethink things a little to make sure I've got it all. The recent full system restore was good, but not as smooth as I'd have liked. Backups are as much about protecting data as they are about getting it back as fast as you need it.

I've just successfully restored a IMatch 5 database from Crashplan for the first time but I had to create a work around. That's why I was looking at Acronis TI again (2011 for me -- never had a problem with it).

* Crashplan gives me versioned backups to local backup drives and online, BUT it does not backup the 1.5gb database in a way that it can be restored
* Syncback SE gives me non-versioned backups of files, plus a versioned backup of the database to a drive I can take offsite
* Acronis TI gives me full system images, always restorable but large

I don't really want to have 2 x always on backups running (TI and Crashplan) but don't want to give up Crashplan's offsite backup. Perhaps I need to have TI running locally, Crashplan for online only. More thinking I think...

[Mario]

Whatever you do, test the restore functionality as carefully as the backup functionality. The problem with backups is usually that the restore does not work, for whatever reason.

I use TI 2010 very successfully. Never bothered to upgrade because after the 2010 they only added superfluous functionality not directly related to the core task. Which is unfortunately common these days, because if the core function (seamless backup) is 100% done, what else can you add to make users buy upgrades. And suddenly your CD burn program has also a media manager and a safe delete and a tea timer... 

(I have a theory, which is not really tested, but is based on occasionally reading the Acronis forums.  When version 201x is released it is full of bugs.  Progressively they are ironed out, but by the time they mostly are, they release the next year's program, which is full of new bugs and you can't then buy 201x.

That describes the state of the software industry these days.
Hopefully people don't say that about IMatch 5, once it is out....   

[medgeek]

...and a tea timer...

lol!