Acronis True Image Hell
I use Acronis True Image Enterprise Server and Server for Windows to backup my servers. The past Monday I came into the office as I normally do. I open my email to check the status of the backups. I open a couple of them when one of them has a weird message. It says,
“Cannot create the image of the logical drive C: because it is currently in use by running applications or the logical drive contains bad sectors. : None”
along with a couple of other messages. I figure that the drive must have some bad sectors since the server is a production server so of course there are running applications. There have been applications running on it during the backup time for the past year and a half and there never was a problem. So, I restart the backup job thinking that it may have been some odd occurrence but I get the same error. I run a check disk with no options (this doesn’t actually change or correct anything) and it fails. I now think that there must really be something wrong with the server. I schedule some downtime so I can run the chkdsk again. This time it run ok and I give it a reboot. The message is still there after trying to restart the backup job. Now I really think that I need to run the chkdsk with the /r option to fix the bad sectors. This process starts at midnight (like I said…it is a production server) and it runs until 3 am (btw…I am up and waiting the whole time for it to finish). The machine reboots and I restart the backup job…same error!?
Contacting tech support for Acronis is really only an email away. They don’t seem to have phone support. I have used their email support before without any success. After sending a couple of emails back and forth with Acronis I get an email requesting that I run a program called “Devicetree.zip”. At the end of this email there is a quick one sentence remark that says, “Please note that the application may crash the system when you exit, so we recommend you to save all your work and close other programs prior to running it.” Crash my system?! Do I really want to run this program on my production server?!
Anyway, I ended up buying another USB drive and using NTbackup while I figure out whether or not I want to continue to use Aronis or switch to Symantec.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
Next time use Paragon Software. Better product and if you have a tech support issues, they pick up the phone….
I have the same problem but my drive has never worked. I paid for Acronis TI Server edition and from the first try it gave the error “Drive is in use or has bad sectors”. I assume and you confirm that it can work with a drive in use so I don’t even understand that error. I also schedule downtime and scan drive, no errors found, none fixed. I’m also a pretty heavy user of TI for workstations, so I know how this SHOULD work, but have never seen it work on a server.
I need to agree with the comments about the terrible support.
It takes days to get a response when you are trying to resolve an issue that is critical.
I also had a technician (Asier Gutierrez) insinuate that I did not have a legal copy and would not provide any support. I do have a legal copy but they cannot find it in their data base, but they say “Please, beware that the provided serial number is only for internal use, and it is not usually distributed, only in very particular cases.”
I would not buy their products going forward…..