CoNetrix

Blog: Acronis

I had a recurring issue months ago with Acronis causing my laptop to shut down during some backups (an occasional backup would succeed).  The shut downs were not blue screen crashes but rather, an abrupt shut down, with no warning, as if the power button were pressed and held down.

In the past 10 months or so, I’ve received a new laptop, and rebuilt it (to move to Windows 7 Enterprise and BitLocker), so I don’t remember if uninstalling/reinstalling Acronis, installing a new build of Acronis or one of the other changes to my laptop made the issue go away…temporarily.  Unfortunately, the issue apparently returned a few weeks ago.  I recently discovered by scheduled backups to an external hard drive had not been working for a couple of weeks.

A coworker suggested I use Windows 7 native Backup and Restore and, so far, it appears to be working well.  While not offering the granular backup configuration options Acronis offers, it allows for system image backups in addition to standard backups which provide for easy restoration of individual folders and files.  That, and, it doesn’t shut down my laptop.  :D

Security and Compliance, Windows 7, Acronis,
 

My laptop data backups to an external hard drive quit working.  I am using Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 and a scheduled backup would always result in a “bad username and password” error.

I double checked my windows domain credentials, created backup accounts and checked those credentials, used the default local administrator and checked those credentials. None of them worked.

Here is the solution from Acronis support: [more]

When you edit the manual backup plan to schedule make sure that you select the backup Location and renter the Online location credential and then move on to scheduling it and save it to perform the backup.
Once you edit the existing backup plan you would have to re-enter the location where you want to backup or else it would not take in the previous user name and password.

So basically, you have to change the backup location in order to get it to recognize the plan credentials.  Glad they had the answer. Don’t know I would have every thought to re-enter the location, since it wasn’t changing.

Security and Compliance, Acronis,
 

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.

Networking, Acronis, backup,
 

While working on a task to upgrade the hard drives on a Windows 2002 SBS machine. I installed Acronis in order to create an image of the C & D drive then recover it to the new larger hard drive. I recovered the image to the new drives and finished getting everything back online.

I decided to uninstall Acronis which showed to uninstall just fine using it’s uninstall. After backup ran that night it had Volume Shadow Copy errors. I checked and found that the Microsoft VSS writers where not accessible. I ran “VSSadmin / list writers” which showed there was no writers available. After researching I found that others who uninstalled Acronis 9.1 had the same issue. I could not find a solution that worked for anyone. I found an article (linked to below) that has a list of DLL’s that Micrisoft Premier Support recommends to reregister. I reregistered the DLL's and after a reboot there were still no VSS writers available.  [more]

I then decided to run System File Checker which is built into Windows XP and Server 2003. I used “sfc.exe /scannow” and let it run. After which I reregistered the DLL’s like before. This time when I ran “VSSadmin /list writers” all the writers were listed. I went back to Backup Exec and was able to select “Shadow?Copy?Components” and “System State”, which I could not before.

Link to information about SFC.exe   -   http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310747
Link to list of DLL’s to reregister  -   http://backupassist.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=28

Networking, Volume Shadow Copy, Windows 2003 Server, Acronis,