This gotcha should only apply to Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Advanced Workstation. The “Advanced” version is the enterprise version and comes with a lot more components, including a separate license server. As I was troubleshooting a different backup issue, I noticed a log entry that said, “Cannot check the license key. Either Acronis License Server is unavailable, or the license key is corrupt. Check connectivity to Acronis License Server and run it to manage licenses”. Additionally, the management console told me I had 17 days before the license would expire and the software would stop working. [more]
The license server is installed locally on my machine, so I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t be able to communicate. However, when I opened the license server and clicked “Manage licenses on the local machine” I got a pop-up error that said, “E000807D5: Computer ‘localhost’ is not found”. About this time, I remembered I had disabled some of the Acronis services that I thought were only necessary in an enterprise deployment. After playing with them, I discovered the “Acronis Remote Agent” service is required for the license server to communicate. After enabling this service, the license error message went away.
One security note: The Acronis Remote Agent service is also used for remote connectivity to the system so that IT staff can remotely manage the Acronis software. For that reason, I went into the firewall rules and blocked all of the Acronis services from getting in/out of the firewall.