True Image 2020 -Backup option settings loss
See Clean up versions for a side effect of this problem.
I guess I lucked out insofar as I noticed this issue rather late -- just in time to search for a support thread a few days ago and see that others were experiencing the issue. I've used Acronis at several workplaces in the past; if I'd been working in a place it was deployed currently I'd probably have been pulling my hair out. Luckily (or unluckily?) I'm currently simply a home user, who really didn't know his data wasn't being guarded as requested. It wasn't until I noticed an infrequent backup behaved unexpectedly that I realized none of my settings were correct. Acronis is ideally a set-it-and-forget-it solution!
I 'redid' several of my backup setups, while deleting the old tasks, since I couldn't get any of my 'fixed' settings to stick. This seemed to work well enough, though not entirely, but it was my initial troubleshooting. Strangely, after a reboot today, those 'deleted' backups reappeared in my list. Though, they were easily deleted again since they hadn't run or run properly in some time.
Fortunately, as a home user, there's nothing mission-critical on my machine, and there's likely not anything of tremendous value to me that's not duplicated elsewhere too. I've just been around computers long enough to know that everybody "is going to get around to making a local backup," and it's usually following an event where they needed one. I'm not somebody that's restoring from the backups unless necessary, or deploying images at scale (these days), it's just a safety net.
The good is it's working again, and since I've learned a bit more about using the program at home and taken some note of my personal preferences/needs, I did some long-overdue cleanup and maintenance on my configs.
I won't echo the others in the thread too much, other than to say that I agree the comms from support could have been better. This is a bit of a show-stopper-level bug, some transparency in an easier-to-find spot would've gone a long way. I had to dig a bit, since my version of the problem was 'backups lost schedule settings' mostly, or at first blush that was my primary issue.
I found following entry in the Knowledge Base about this issue:
'63819: Acronis True Image: issues after datacenter update'
FranDries, thank you for spotting this KB document and sharing it in this topic. I have given my own Feedback on the document and way that Acronis handled this issue using the option to say the document was not helpful at the end. I would suggest that other users do the same too.
That KB document should have contained a proper apology to users affected, and should have been published in these forums not hidden in the KB.
On this subject, I received an email this morning from Acronis. I hope this is going out to everyone, but I suspect only those with subscriptions.
Dear customer,
This letter is to inform you about a temporary technical issue with Acronis True Image. The issue has been resolved, but we wanted to keep you in the loop.
A recent software update was initiated at Acronis data centers involving Family Dashboard components of Acronis True Image, which required re-indexing of the service data on Acronis’ servers. In certain scenarios, this re-indexing may have modified backup plan scripts in Acronis True Image, leading to the incorrect interpretation of backup settings in the product.
While this issue only affected internal Acronis True Image files, a group of our customers may have seen these symptoms:
| • | Some backup settings were returned to program default values |
| • | Some backups using .tib format started creating .metadata files in addition to ordinary .tib files |
We have taken corrective measures but if you have noticed any of these issues, please refer to this KB article.
As a precaution, we recommend you download and install all of the latest product updates.
As a sign of our good faith, Acronis is providing the following to make up for any inconvenience this incident may have caused.
| • | Free three-month extension to your subscription. No additional efforts are required from your side, the extension is automatically applied to your account. |
We apologize for any inconvenience, and we thank you for choosing Acronis.
Dear Acronis Community,
while the emails with additional details continue being sent out, I want to post the official acknowledgement here.
Yes, a software update was initiated at the Acronis data centers involving Family Dashboard components of Acronis True Image, which required re-indexing of the service data on Acronis’ servers. The investigation showed that in certain scenarios, this re-indexing modified some backup plan scripts in Acronis True Image, which led to the incorrect interpretation of backup settings in the product.
While this issue only affected internal Acronis True Image files, as is reported here, you may have seen:
• Some backup settings returned to program default values
• Some backups using .tib format creating .metadata files in addition to ordinary .tib files
We have taken corrective measures but if you notice any of these issues, you should refer to this KB article https://kb.acronis.com/content/63819
As a precaution, we also recommend you download and install all of the latest product updates.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused and will be sending you an email with additional details shortly.
The Acronis Team
I got my official email from Acronis yesterday. Kudo's to Acronis for sending this out. I would highly encourage Acronis R&D and Support to continue this more open approach with with their customers when issues first pop up, posting known issues in a common area and what to do (or what not to do) in the short-term. This is a great step forward from a communications perspective. 😀. Please, please, please keep this up.
I was affected by this, but I didn't receive any kind of email.
It's important to ensure all potentially affected users get an email, and that they are explicitly told to check that scheduled backups are still happening. People may have missed a month of backups without realizing it, and may continue to do so.
I didn't notice this problem myself until I discovered that my backups were out of date. Thankfully the files I needed to recover had also been synced to Dropbox, so I was able to get previous versions there.
I didn't receive any email either.
I didn't receive any e-mail notification, and my subscription hasn't been extended.
Acronis' incompetence continues apace.
Acronis............since 12/11 on this thread..............crickets.
Update: we continue sending out the emails in batches (distribution is scheduled every day) to inform all potentially affected customers. Thank you for your patience!
Steve Smith wrote:Thomas, just to bring together the factors here: This issue has affected users on both Windows 10 and 7, and using ATI 2018, 2019 & 2020.
Erik's scenario is slightly different for one computer that the settings are being reset again after being reconfigured when the Acronis MMS service is active, but he has other computers where MMS didn't do this.
I lost all my backup settings at the last week in Nov. Win 7; TI 2018.
How is this not a crisis at Acronis? if many people are affected by this. After all the irony is that you want a reliable backup product!
Ekaterina - Please post on this thread when Acronis believes that it has completed notifying "all potentially affected customers."
It appears this is their twitter feed: https://twitter.com/Acronis if you want to get in touch with them in other ways.
I received the notification e-mail from Acronis.
The "good faith" offer I received was a 70% discount on an upgrade to True Image 2020.
I already have True Image 2020. My subscription runs until December 2020.
I received the same email and offer today. The discount is worth having even with a subscription if you have more computers to protect as you can purchase a perpetual license which will work long after your subscription has ended.
Chuck Davis wrote:Ekaterina - Please post on this thread when Acronis believes that it has completed notifying "all potentially affected customers."
The last batch of emails was sent on Friday, please let me know if you didn't receive the email.
Steve Smith pointed me to this thread, thanks Steve. I rebuilt the backup jobs but wonder if anyone knows if continuity will be maintained with the backups that previously completed. In other words, will the incrementals pick up where they left off? Will the chains still clean themselves up and not start again and filling up the destination drives? Will older backups be recoverable? This is quite the mess and Acronis, as usual, has handled it poorly.
Hi, I didn't receive any email from Acronis !
I didn't receive any Acronis email either, but Ekaterina said
"all potentially affected customers."
Maybe Acronis somehow knows I wasn't effected.
Well, I'm an affected customer ! I'm not interested in apologies, nor a financial compensation. But I would like to know if Acronis will handle this kind of severe problems differently in the future. I'm a retired IT Specialist (40 yrs experience in large systems) and I know such errors can happen whatever measures you take to avoid them. But informing customers in due time is essential.
Ekaterina,
As noted above, the "good faith" offer I received was a 70% discount on an upgrade to True Image 2020. I already have True Image 2020. My subscription runs until December 2020.
First, will Acronis continue to function after a subscription expires? (Understanding that it won't be further upgraded and cloud services might be lost.)
If so, I prefer to stay with the subscription model instead of switching back to a perpetual license.
Does Acronis have a different "good faith" offer that takes into the account the product that I actually have?
Thank you.
Chuck, see KB 63207: Acronis True Image 2020 licensing - where it details the way subscription works if you let it expire / don't renew!
Standard license is unlimited in time. Annual subscription means your license is limited for 1 year. You can renew your subscription and continue using the product.
After your Acronis True Image subscription expires, all product functionality will be blocked until further subscription renewal, however, the backed up data is still accessible:
- For 5 days after subscription expires you can continue making backups, including backups to Acronis Cloud storage.
- During 30 days after subscription expires you can restore data from Cloud Storage. Thirty days after subscription expiration the data in Acronis Cloud storage is destroyed.
- Local backups remain available for restore.
Chuck Davis wrote:Does Acronis have a different "good faith" offer that takes into the account the product that I actually have?
Dear Chuck,
we've checked your account and added 3-month extension to your current subscription, the auto-renewal is scheduled for 2021-03-03
Hi,
I too lost my Acronis backup settings on a PC I maintain (Windows 10 Pro, Acronis True Image 2020) in November 2019.
I reestablished the settings and rescheduled the backups with no problem except for one thing: the email notifications reporting backup success or failure.
I understand I can enter the server SMTP details for an email address I own and get email notifications for backup success or failure using that but I do not want to do that. I want them to come from the default noreply-abc@cloud.acronis.com email address as they did reliably before settings were lost.
I don't see a way to reestablish that. Am I missing something? If I try turning on email notifications in the backup options, it insists that the SMTP field must be entered. This was not required before my settings were lost.
Thank you in advance for any help,
Sue
Hey, backup email notifications magically arrived last night. Thanks for the fix (or did I wake something up playing with option settings yesterday). Either way, I no longer have a problem.
This identical issue has just happened for me again, on 15 Jan 2021.
It was on my wife's newer PC, on which I had installed Acronis True Image in March 2020, but had not then disabled the Acronis Managed Machine Service (I had forgotten about this particular issue).
On my own PC, which has had that service disabled since the Oct 2019 occasion, everything is fine.
As before, my first clue about the problem was the lack of an email notification of backup completion.
I have now disabled Acronis Managed Machine Service on my wife's PC, and will restore the original .tis file to the scripts directory.
It reflects badly on Acronis that this has happened again. :(
Anthony, yours is the first report of this issue returning that I have seen so far! I guess if the issue has returned then we will see a lot more reports in the forums unless it was a temporary glitch on the Acronis dashboard servers!
Please submit Feedback direct to Acronis using the tool provided in the GUI to alert them to seeing this issue come back, along with a link to this forum topic for background details!
True Image 2021 -Backup option settings loss - It’s Baaaaaaaaaaaack (from TI2020)
I just had this happen as well.
I have 5 computers that I support all running the latest Windows 10 build and Acronis 2021. Four of the computers are on the same LAN network (Tesla, Fermi, Bugatti, Firewire) and the fifth one (Harold) is on an entirely separate network. This morning I discovered that the local Acronis console on Tesla included the NAS and Cloud backup settings for Bugatti, under “This computer” for Tesla.
No settings were touched or changed. No Acronis updates installed. The only thing I did in the last day was view (and only view) the console settings on Bugatti via the Acronis Cloud console.
This was a HUGE issue with Acronis 2020 that was finally acknowledged and fixed but the problem trashed a lot of folks settings across multiple supported PC’s which had to be reconfigured (the Acronis backup settings) for all affected PC’s.
I posted this in March 2020, https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/rogue-backups-downloaded-scripts-folder , and was also reported as an issue in November 2019, https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/other-pc-backup-routines-showing-under-computer
The problem was heavily discussed in the thread https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/true-image-2020-backup-option-settings-loss and finally acknowledged to be an issue with Acronis’ cloud servers somehow utilizing the Acronis Managed Machine Service Mini (MMSM) service to inadvertently copy other backup scripts (both NAS and Cloud) from one PC to another PC, administered through the same Acronis account.
Yes, It's back again... Three PCs affected here running TI2020 and as 'automatic cleanup' was disabled as a result my storage pool is complaining about lack of space (which is what alerted me last time around).
The same has happened for me in the last week or so on both of 2 PCs that I have Acronis backing up. Additionnally, one of the PCs I have set to shut down after the backup completes (I set it to run in the early hours of Saturday morning). I noticed it didn't shut down last week, but didn't think much of it. When the same happened again this morning, that's when I decided to look further into it as I'd also noticed the issue of no email alerts (sometimes I suspect Yahoo mail when that happens as I've also had an issue this week with notifications from Veeam backup I have running on a server).
Both of my Acronis instances had lost all their email notification settings (all fields blank), the validation option, the automatic cleanup options and the one set to shut down after backing up had also lost the tick in that option. More importantly though, both have had the backup scheme options changed. One that had been set for differential backups was now set to incremental, and both had the create a full version reset to the default of after 5 incremental versions (one had been set for 4, the other for 6).
Neither PC has had any Acronis updates recently applied, so how is it that Acronis is able to change the options set by me on my computers?
It's happening to me again too. That last good backups I had were on 1/19 (6 backups). Since then, I lost settings on 2 backups.
By the way, service "Acronis Managed Machine Service Mini" (mmsminisrv) was running again. I just turned it off and disabled it.
Interesting that the last post shows that the last good backups they have are on 01/19. I have the same issue. Something must have occurred on that date and probably related to a Win10 update where a re-boot was involved as I have lost notification settings in the past with earlier versions of ATI and it always happened after an update that needed a re-boot.
I am running the latest version of ATI 2019 on 3 systems and each have 2 backups configured. Every one lost all the settings within the Notifications on one of the jobs, that is run nightly, so never got an email notification since 01/19 for that one. The other job which is only run manually, did not lose the settings.
I wonder if it is only doing it with scheduled jobs. If so, I wonder why only those would be affected.
Gary, this is not caused by any Windows Updates!
There have been other reports in the forums of this type of reset of backup scheme settings that are reminiscent of issues that occurred in November 2020 which were caused by the Acronis Dashboard servers (following changes that Acronis made at that time!).
I suspect that a similar event has occurred though I have not seen this for any of my own systems, but I only tend to use Incremental backups with mostly default settings, so may not have noticed!
You will need to do several things:
- Reconfigure your backup task back to how you want it to be set.
- Either sign in to your Acronis Dashboard (from the ATI GUI Account page) and remove your PC from the Dashboard to prevent further unwanted changes
or
Open the Windows Services control panel and set the Acronis Managed Machine Mini Service to be Disabled start up instead of being set as Automatic.
Note: if taking the second option, this would be undone if you had to repair or reinstall ATI on your PC or install a new build version.
- Send in Feedback to Acronis via the Feedback tool provided in the ATI GUI Help area to complain about this issue and include a link to this forum topic.
Hello Everyone
if you are facing the issue with the product settings suddenly changed, would you please send us Acronis system report from your PC via the Feedback option with the description what settings were lost? We're currently investigating the reports about the settings loss and my colleagues would be grateful for any additional piece of information.
Hello Everyone
if you are facing the issue with the product settings suddenly changed, would you please send us Acronis system report from your PC via the Feedback option with the description what settings were lost? We're currently investigating the reports about the settings loss and my colleagues would be grateful for any additional piece of information.
It did happen again. Only way I knew was that notifications stopped from a few systems on which I have it enabled. Now I have to check out the many others that I do not have notifications set on.
Out of 5 systems I checked, 3 have been clobbered. Doomwolf (above) pretty much captured the essence of what happened.
I did submit a ticket today. I have system reports to offer.
Dashboard/Managed Machine Mini Service needs to be an installation OPTION if that's what is causing this. Benefits definitely don't outweigh the cost.
Further comment censored...
CC wrote:It did happen again. Only way I knew was that notifications stopped from a few systems on which I have it enabled. Now I have to check out the many others that I do not have notifications set on.
Out of 5 systems I checked, 3 have been clobbered. Doomwolf (above) pretty much captured the essence of what happened.
I did submit a ticket today. I have system reports to offer.
thank you for collecting the log files - I'll pass the logs to the RnD team for investigation
It's happening again for me too. On 2021-06-29, I noticed that the schedule for one of my jobs was cleared so I added a daily schedule again. Today, 2021-07-02 the schedule for that job as well as another job had been cleared again.
See ATI 2018 forum topic: Backup Options Disappeared where another user is reporting the return of this Managed Machine Service Mini issue yet again!
Also topic: OK, I have NO idea what has happened? reporting the same issue!
Same here, after the disaster in 2019, the issue re-apperared. Backup settings got overwritten, standard incremental scheme, no more schedules and auto-cleanup, no more notifications. This breaks backup chains and creates a ton of manual work to reset everything as should be. I need backups to work reliably, not some dashboards in the cloud, and certainly not lost backup configurations once a year.
I'm glad someone started this topic. It had never happened to me until last week. Even though I was away on vacation, all computers that normally run backups were on. On all four computers, the backup settings seem to have been reset to default. I noticed this because I stopped receiving the completion notices via E-mail at some point mid-week, and checked one of the affected machines this morning. This affected computers running both 2019 and 2020 versions of Acronis True Image. It's strange that two different versions of the software would be affected at the same time!
Does Acronis back up its own settings in such a way that they can be restored from an earlier backup? Otherwise, I have to type in the E-mail settings again and tweak the backup scheme.
Did Acronis confirm the problem and announce a solution yet? Am hesitating to re-configure all backups just to see them getting erased again
Jim AD1C wrote:Does Acronis back up its own settings in such a way that they can be restored from an earlier backup? Otherwise, I have to type in the E-mail settings again and tweak the backup scheme.
Yes, on the bottom of the main Settings page is an option to Backup your task settings to a zip file that can be Imported back if needed later. This has been there since 2019 version.
You could also copy the C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Scripts folder contents from a backup archive (.tib or .tibx) though you will need to ensure that Acronis Active Protection is turned off (or stopped in 2021) to be able to replace existing .tib.tis script files.
Did Acronis confirm the problem of erased backup configurations and have they announced a solution yet? - Got no response from neither support nor customer contact center yet.
See post from earlier in this topic copied below (from 2nd July)
Ekaterina wrote:Hello Everyone
if you are facing the issue with the product settings suddenly changed, would you please send us Acronis system report from your PC via the Feedback option with the description what settings were lost? We're currently investigating the reports about the settings loss and my colleagues would be grateful for any additional piece of information.
First posted in this thread on 11/05/2019, after discovering my 5 PCs running Windows 10 Pro were affected by this issue.
I can confirm the issue has occurred again, at the beginning of July 2021. I cannot believe this issue has not been resolved.
FYI, I did not receive the 'good faith' offer email, in fact, I never receive emails from Acronis, unless I open a support case.
Please can anyone advise further and/or provide an explanation as to why, after 22 months, this issue has not been fixed?
It's baaaaaaaaaaaaack!
https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-cyber-protect-home-office-forum…
(2022 post is awaiting moderation as of this moment.)
Workaround appears to be the same: Disable MMS
One would think that after all the grief this caused in 2019, and again in 2021, that Acronis would have added this issue to their regression testing for software releases and/or datacenter maintenance.