Frozen at "Calculating time remaining" upon launch

This issue was resolved for me in ATI 2016 recently after I installed the latest update, Build 5634.

Uninstall ATI, reboot and reinstall. Start new backup tasks in empty directories.

Thank's Kevin and Pat. I'm running Build 5634 also. In Windows 10 Task Manager, I found many instances of various True Image and Acronis "components" running? I took a change to kill all these processes -- Acronis was unresponsive anyway. Some of these background tasks had a "Scheduled backup" name to them? So I reasoned that, perhaps, my precious "backups" could have some kind of "schedule" attached to them, unknowingly. I managed to get to the Options of each of my "Bakcups" and turned all scheduling off. And it all started working fine! Case solved? We'll see. Thank's for your kind help.

Yes, in fact after writing my post, I ended up having the same problem. A backup task I had set up for trials was "calculating" and I couldn't stop it. I ended up ending the Acronis True Image Service (32bits) in the task manager. Then I was able to delete the task and get back to normal

Ah! Thank you for replying further. As a long time Windows user, I've gone through a lot of backups and system images solutions. When I used to work in prepress, we were big fans of Retrospect so, naturally, when I moved to Windows on my own, I bought Retrospect for Windows and relied on tape backups. Then came the various Norton Ghost generations. Retrospect could not (at the time) deal with system images so, Ghost was a logical next step. But at the same time I embraced the Ghost "concept", I started to notice this Acronis Disk Image. I confess I tried it one and did something stupid with dynamic repartitioning one my my hard drives and was turned off as a result. But with the evolutions of Windows, Windows 7, 8 and now 10, and the kinds of "limitations" that I see in Windows's own disk image tool, I reason I had to try Acronis TrueImage, at least I had to give it a try. I have five PCs in our house, some I use personally, some are used by my kids for school and Facebook "work". I hesitated before buying an individual license or a multiple license. Because I wasn't sure how good would the program be, I decided to play it safe and only go for a single license. But, now with these "Calculating" problems behind me, witnessing the good behavior of the application, I think I'd be interested in some kind of upgrades ;-)

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Dear All,

Thank you for your comments so far. I'm experiencing the exact same issue and despite of trying to kill some of the processes and services associated to Acronis I always end up in the same situation..."Calculating remaining time" that goes for ever. Any other thoughts, ideas,  solutions would be appreciated. Many thanks.

I have exactly the same problem on three different computers. All three running Windows 10. on another computer with windows 7 installed, True Image 2016 works. Has to be a bug.

Things have been working great for me since I ended the default scheduling of backups. I would suggest that Acronis changes the default for any new Backups to *not* have any scheduling associated. Having a default scheduling is asking for too much trouble from the casual user.

I've had this same problem since True Image 2015 and now 2016. Before I used to get things working again by deleting all my backups and re-creating the jobs. I'm now stuck so that no backups work anymore and just hang even after a full reinstall and different backup drives. This is with Windows 10 but the problems started when I was still on Windows 8.1. I do have another machine also using True Image 2016 which is on Windows 7 and has been fine all along

I feel your pain. I don't know what to say? Other than, perhaps, suggest to contact tech support? But in all my attemps to obtain help from Acronis tech support so far, nothing has worked? I mean, tech support does not reply at all? Which makes me doubt about what i will do in the future with TrueImage.

As I could't wait any longer, I installed another software that seems to be working just fine. I hope the next release of Acronis will fix this issue as I still quite like it and am willing to give it another shot...

Same here too!..Stuck in a loop or something, then location-destination greys out, have to to force program to quit or crash...then re-start PC...wait for "Acronis is terminating operations....wait 2 mins" for PC re-start...PC finally re-starts, open Acronis again, hit backup now button (lower right)...get error "Cannot locate backup version 1" message...all even though Acronis sucessfully created and validated 1 Full and 2 differential backups, Entire PC to External Drive default folder/drive locations on destination drive, no extra folders created by me. The blank folder/file icon in picture, on top of normal backup files, was created by Acronis, but never completed ,aparently after another all night endless loop session, I noticed this morning.

I've actually deleted the backup job and I'm now just using the Windows file history and image backup until hopefully sometime in the future Acronis takes notice of the issues and fixes them 

Build 5634

I'm getting the same problem with the latest biuld already have uninstalled it but still stuck/freezing on "Calculating remaining time" Help!

Hello everyone,

Here's a response from our expert concerning this problem:

We have changed backup procedure in True Image 2015. Now it utilizes Volume Shadow Copy service from Microsoft. When there are issues with this service, the backup would suffer as well. The solution is to disable Volume Shadow Copy service to make True Image 2015 run backup using our proprietary snapshotting technology only, SnapAPI. Another possible factor are schedule settings. In rare cases backups are hanging if schedule is enabled. Please follow the steps below to troubleshoot the issue: 

1) make sure that no backups are running 

2) right-click This PC picture in Windows Explorer and select Manage 

3) navigate to Services section 

4) locate the service name Volume Shadow Copy service. Right-click it and select Stop. Then double-click it and choose Disabled option from Startup type drop-down menu. Click OK to save changes. 

5) run the backup and see if it is working according to your expectations. Note that a disk snapshot is created before the archive is actually written, progress bar could seem to hang, but you just need to wait. Depending on the amount of data to backup and current I/O disk usage, snapshot creation stage could take up to 20 minutes. You need to wait and do not cancel the backup. 

If the solution above do not help, please change the backup settings: set the schedule option to "Do not schedule". Default option is Daily, and you want to change it to "Do not schedule" and save settings. Then run the backup again and see if the issue disappears. 

Thanks Jury,

so far so good, seems to be working now. We'll see if this turns out to be the longer term work around. Although I would hope that what ever the issue with the volume shadow copy services is fixed at some point (or at least have the option within Acronis to use it or not)

Old thread so I don't know if anybody is still following it but I recently encountered this problem with Acronis True Image 2016. Rather than just disable the volume shadow copy service completely, I set my backup job to do it before the backup and reenable it afterwards.

The full process is posted here: http://www.lymans.net/2016/03/fixing-acronis-true-image-2016-hang-backup/

Since setting that up I haven't had any problems with the backup job.

Mike,

Many thanks for the information and nice write up.  I don't have the hanging issues, but if I do, or if I see others with a similar issue, I will be sure to pass this along to them. I will also post this in the MVP forum and hope that it may be picked up by the Acronis engineers to take a look at as well.  Essentially, it looks like it's disabling VSS, allowing Acronis to use the snapman.sys backup driver and just turning VSS backon, so seems easy enough.  We should point out that those with databases (Oracle/SQl), probably don't want to do this though as VSS is needed for those or they could risk database corruption if the database is currently active. 

Just a note to say this thread is still being read.  Running my ATI 2014.  

Dear Acronis, I will NOT upgrade until problems are sorted, much as I like Acronis.  

Not all of us want to subscribe to that dustbin in the sky called the cloud.

Hi Alan, This usually occurs if there is a VSS issue on the local system.  2014 and earlier versions only use the Acronis proprietary SNAPAPI backup method.  2015 and newer use VSS as the default method.  If VSS is having issues, it's normally something with the local system VSS service, so you can use the work-a-round mentioned to revert to the SNAPAPI method from 2014 and earlier.  I have a newer 2017 beta version and it actually looks like it may be possible to do all of this directly in the GUI, but we'll have to see if it makes it into the next quarterly release or not.  Ultimately, there's nothign wrong with reverting from VSS to Snapapi.  If/when you do upgrade to a newer version, I would highly recommend you do a complete uninstall and fresh install so yo ustart clean.  The jump from 2014 to 2015 was pretty significant and I think it may be better to start clean to avoid any potential upgrade issues or leftovers causing problems

Full clean insturctions:  https://forum.acronis.com/forum/126092#comment-391779

Wanted to point out this still worked for me in 2025. Although the backup did have a separate problem "File System Error is Found. Consider checking the disk using Check Disk Utility". Onto the next issue...

 

 

Jury Lazarev wrote:

Hello everyone,

Here's a response from our expert concerning this problem:

We have changed backup procedure in True Image 2015. Now it utilizes Volume Shadow Copy service from Microsoft. When there are issues with this service, the backup would suffer as well. The solution is to disable Volume Shadow Copy service to make True Image 2015 run backup using our proprietary snapshotting technology only, SnapAPI. Another possible factor are schedule settings. In rare cases backups are hanging if schedule is enabled. Please follow the steps below to troubleshoot the issue: 

1) make sure that no backups are running 

2) right-click This PC picture in Windows Explorer and select Manage 

3) navigate to Services section 

4) locate the service name Volume Shadow Copy service. Right-click it and select Stop. Then double-click it and choose Disabled option from Startup type drop-down menu. Click OK to save changes. 

5) run the backup and see if it is working according to your expectations. Note that a disk snapshot is created before the archive is actually written, progress bar could seem to hang, but you just need to wait. Depending on the amount of data to backup and current I/O disk usage, snapshot creation stage could take up to 20 minutes. You need to wait and do not cancel the backup. 

If the solution above do not help, please change the backup settings: set the schedule option to "Do not schedule". Default option is Daily, and you want to change it to "Do not schedule" and save settings. Then run the backup again and see if the issue disappears.