ATI - Recovery

Instructions on how to troubleshoot problems after recovery

Sometimes a recovery process seems to work without any visible problems, but the resulting files after recovery are not complete and/or are corrupted or an application does not work correctly in the restored system. This article will explain how to troubleshoot this issue. Follow these instructions if you have corrupted or otherwise unusable files/applications after recovery.

Troubleshooting

General recommendations

Because Acronis products work with the storage system of an operating system on a very low level, there is a small risk that different conflicts on this level can lead to an operating system crash during backup or other operations. Please follow the instructions below to troubleshoot these issues, depending on what operating system is being used..

Network connectivity problem can take place if any antivirus is working on source or/and target computers. Beside that, the antivirus software may have its own firewall that can block the traffic even if real-time shields are stopped.

If you have any problem with network connection (e.g. you are not able to back up onto NAS or any other network share), follow these steps.

In some cases, system can become unbootable after recovery operation. No BSOD, just a black screen with blinking cursor or a boot error is displayed. How to troubleshoot such issues and what information needs to be collected, described in this article.

Collect information for investigation of operating system lockups

This article provides information on troubleshooting possible problems with file or partition recovery.

Depending on the issue you are facing navigate to the corresponding section below.

Prerequisites

  1. It is not possible to perform disk/partition recovery to a disk with a different logical sector size.

    You can check the logical sector size in the system information:

    • Go to Start. In search, type msinfo32.exe and press Enter.

Instructions on how to troubleshoot and resolve issues with corrupt backups

Make sure that the antivirus software running in your environment does not block Acronis products. See Acronis Software: Making Acronis Products Compatible with Antivirus Software

Under specific circumstances, the software may crash. It is very important to report a crash instead of trying to workaround it. Normal workflow for a crash problem is the following:

Product may hang under specific circumstances.

There are 2 types of hanging:

  • Actual hanging. That is a state similar to a crash. That means that software halts and is doing nothing inside.
  • Infinite loop. This means that on the outside the software looks hanging but inside it is doing some actions over and over again.

Usually when a software hangs its process uses either 100% of CPU (especially when it is infinite loop) or does not use CPU and does not change RAM usage at all (Actual hanging). Still it is difficult to make sure if the software hangs or not. The above means that usually 1 dump is not enough because if that is Infinite Loop – the developers will see that software is working and there is no problem inside. So in order to troubleshoot application lockups you need about 5 dumps collected one after another. A Process Monitor Log will also be useful especially if it actually turns out to be an Infinite Loop.

Please note that an application lockup does not necessarily mean the software is completely unresponsive. A process can hang (e.g. service_process.exe hangs and a backup is stuck), but you can still browse vaults, create new plans etc.

Define the hanging process using Windows Task Manager. In some cases multiple processes are involved in an operation. In this case the hang of 1 process can be caused by some operations in another process. In this case you need  to collect memory dumps of all processes involved in the operation. E.g. if a backup to Acronis Storage Node hangs, you need to collect a dump of service_process of the agent as well as StorageServer.exe process on ASN machine.