Overview

With version 11.7, the Acronis flagship backup product offers enhancements and addresses issues found in the previous releases.

What's new in Acronis Backup

Installation

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 can be used to store the databases of Acronis Backup Management Server.

Licensing

Support for the subscription licensing model. For more information, please refer to the Acronis Backup Licensing FAQ.

Deduplication

128 MB of RAM per 1 TB of unique data are required, instead of 3 GB.
No need to allocate the deduplication database on expensive SSD disks. Regular HDD disks can be used without performance degradation.
Recovery from a deduplicated backup is now 40 percent faster.
The backup speed does not reduce as the deduplication database size increases.
The Storage Node startup time on large data sets is reduced to 1-3 minutes.
Validating deduplicated backups and compacting the data store are now 2.5 times faster.

These improvements are effective when v11.7 agents back up to deduplicating vaults created on v11.7 storage nodes. When a new agent backs up to an old vault or an old agent backs up to a new vault, the old deduplication algorithm is used. To apply the new deduplication algorithm to old backups, you need to import the backups into a newly created vault.

Tape support

Configurable block size for reading and writing to tapes. The default value is taken from the tape device driver.
Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and Hardware Compatibility Tool are introduced. Hardware Compatibility List contains tape devices with confirmed support by Acronis Backup. To learn if your specific device is supported, use the Hardware Compatibility Tool.
Full support for the LTO-7 technology. See the HCL for the exact names of the tested devices.

Centralized management

It is possible to specify a custom backup location for each machine that is included in a centralized backup plan.
In addition to exporting licenses from the management server to an .xml file, you can export them to a .txt file.

Microsoft Exchange Server support

Agent for Exchange can back up and recover Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 databases. Backup and recovery of Exchange 2016 mailboxes (including mailbox recovery from database backups) are not supported.

Supported operating systems

Support for Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 4.
Support for Linux kernel version 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4.
Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, Oracle Linux 7.2, ClearOS, Debian 8.2, Ubuntu 15.10, and Fedora 23.
Support for Windows 2000 in Acronis Backup Advanced is limited. Components of v11.7 cannot be installed in this operating system. To back up machines that run Windows 2000, use the agents of v11.5. The v11.5 agents are compatible with the management components of v11.7.
Acronis Backup for Windows Server and Acronis Backup for PC cannot be installed in Windows 2000. To back up machines that run this operating system, use v11.5.

Acronis Backup v11.5 supports Windows 2000 SP4.

Other

It is possible to use compression in combination with third-party hardware or software deduplication (for disk-level backups only). This effectively reduces the storage space occupied by the backups.
More functionality is available via the command-line interface:
- Generating management server reports
- Deploying Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance)
Agent for VMware does not back up independent disks and Raw Device Mapping (RDM) disks in physical compatibility mode, regardless of the state of a virtual machine. This limitation is introduced for better predictability of the product behavior.
32-bit Linux-based bootable media was optimized in size by removing the rarely used acrocmd utility.
When a disk backup is mounted in the read/write mode, the respective incremental backup is not created immediately, but after the disk backup is unmounted, instead. While the backup is mounted, the changes are saved in the %Temp% folder.

Fixed issues

This section describes issues that have been fixed in Acronis Backup.

Installation

[ABR-72208] Installation on SuSE Linux 8.2 fails. The following error appears: "--nopostun: unknown option".
[ABR-35597] During Acronis Backup installation on a XenServer machine with Windows XP, Windows Small Business Server 2011, or Windows Server 2012 R2 guest operating system, license Acronis Backup Advanced for Citrix XenServer is not accepted.
[ABR-100815] Installation of Acronis Backup Storage Node fails if the Backup Operators group is missing on the machine.
[ABR-100484] Updating Acronis Backup Agent for Windows to Version 11.7 fails. The following error appears: "Access is denied."
[ABR-96631] A perpetual license for Acronis Backup for Windows Server is shown as a subscription license in the installer.

Local management

[ABR-70414] Post data capture commands should run even if taking the data snapshot fails.
[ABR-82971] Acronis Universal Restore does not automatically set '0' as the "DisableCDDB" value data in the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PnP. It leads to a system crash with error 0x0000007B ("INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE").
Note: The fix works only if the "DisableCDDB" value is created locally (not through Group Policy).
[ABR-82513] Acronis Universal Restore fails to apply drivers after the recovery if the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services key in the recovered Windows registry contains more than 504 subkeys.
[ABR-76406] The mouse and the keyboard are not detected on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet booted from Linux-based bootable media.
[ABR-75882] Bootability recovery fails with incorrect GRUB loader record (the root definition is wrong).
[TTASK-11504] Acronis Managed Machine Service crashes on a machine with a specific GPT header present on disk.
[ABR-72212] The Network connection speed backup option does not work when the backup destination is FTP.
[ABR-72003] A RAID5 configuration on an Intel fake RAID controller is detected incorrectly under Linux-based bootable media.
[ABR-71034] Recovering files to existing LVM volumes under Linux-based bootable media fails.
[ABR-70469] Backups via the command-line interface fail. The following error appears: "POR: There is a mismatch in object internal structure. Expected object type is 'composite', actual object type is 'nil'."
[ABR-67736] After a specific backup of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine is recovered as a Hyper-V virtual machine, the resulting VM is unbootable.
[ABR-66816] The second backup to an NFS share created on QNAP NAS fails while the first one is successful.
[ABR-60037] The Acronis TIB Mounter driver is shown as "Not digitally signed" in Windows Device Manager.
[ABR-53834] Retention rules applied to backups located in a personal vault on an external USB drive hang.
[ABR-95876] The list backups command fails under 32-bit WinPE-based bootable media. The following error appears: "Factory for a command with ID = '...' cannot be found".
[ABR-89469] Acronis Bootable Media Builder does not detect Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit for Windows 10 (WinPE 6.0).

Centralized management

[ABR-86461] Acronis Backup Storage Node hangs after a recovery or a browsing operation is canceled and then the backup is deleted from a managed vault.
[ABR-85239] Acronis Backup Management Server incorrectly selects the agent to perform recovery initiated via the command-line utility. As a result, the recovery fails.
[ABR-83298] Validation of an archive or a backup in a deduplicating vault fails if the network connection is unstable. The following error appears: "Cannot establish connection. Check the specified machine address."
[TTASK-12421] From time to time, backups to a centralized managed vault fail. The following error appears: "Insufficient memory to process the command."
[TTASK-11471, TTASK-11683] Acronis Backup Management Server log is filled with the following warnings: "Cannot find the aspect of the instance with ID."
[ABR-84000] Slow export and validation of encrypted backups stored in a centralized vault. As a result of the fix, the speed was increased by up to 3 times.
[TTASK-10860] From time to time, statuses of backup tasks are shown incorrectly on Acronis Backup Management Server.
[TTASK-11440] After the Acronis Backup Storage Node service restart, a deduplicating vault returns the following error: "Vault 'name' is not ready for use."
[ABR-72287] An archive is not deleted from a centralized vault created on an NFS share when the operation is initiated via the command-line utility. Acronis Backup Management Server event log contains the following warning: "The operation is not supported."
[ABR-71497] Scheduled alert notifications configured in the management server options use the UTC time zone instead of the local time.
[ABR-71184] Acronis Backup Management Server uses 98% of CPU when browsing a centralized vault located on a corrupted storage.
[ABR-69913] Acronis Backup Management Server may crash after an update from Version 11.5 Update 5.
[ABR-66893] The Network connection speed backup option does not work when the backup destination is a deduplicating vault.
[ABR-66442] Centralized backups of logical volumes by using selection rules (for example, "/dev/VolGroup/lv_root") fail. The following error appears: "Cannot resolve any inclusion rule."
[ABR-100791] Old Acronis and Windows logo are displayed on the Acronis Backup Management Server Web page.
[ABR-81307] [TTASK-8567] The time stamp in an email notification is different from the actual time of a backup completion.
[ABR-72602] The number of handles for the Acronis Backup Management Server process in Windows Task Manager increases during the list archives and export plan command execution.

Applications support

[TTASK-11553] Acronis Backup may fail to browse an Exchange information store while creating a backup plan.
[ABR-83250] Recovering contacts from an Exchange 2010 public folder fails. The following error appears: "The optional value is null."

Linux

[ABR-72790] Acronis Managed Machine Service crashes when the GRUB entry (grub.cfg) is very large (larger than 3 KB).
[TTASK-11503] An emcpower device that does not have partitions is not detected by Acronis Backup and cannot be selected either as a backup source or a backup destination.
[ABR-71579] A removable USB drive unexpectedly unmounts after a backup is successfully saved to it.
[ABR-71051] dmraid devices are detected twice (as physical disks and as dynamic disks). As a result, the data stored on such volumes are backed up twice.
[ABR-69135] The full cataloging of an XFS partition after a backup gets stuck. As a result, there are a lot of errors in the /var/log/messages file.
[ABR-71317] [TTASK-10992] Under Fedora 22, it is not possible to create a personal or an unmanaged centralized vault on SFTP.

Tapes

[ABR-68221] The operation of moving tapes to another slot may fail on a Hyper-V virtual machine.
[ABR-100671] In some cases, backing up to manually rotated tapes fails.
[ABR-90171] After updating Acronis Backup to Version 11.7, replication from a managed vault to a managed tape vault fails. The following error appears: "The archive is invalid or its type is unsupported."
[ABR-84853] Backing up files to a personal tape vault takes too much time.

Virtualization

[ABR-84006] The conversion of an EFI machine to a virtual machine from an incremental backup fails while the conversion of the same machine from a full backup is successful. The following error appears: "Failed to prepare operations. Error code: 7 'Disk is not found. Make sure that all the hard disks are installed in your computer.'"
[ABR-82538] While a machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 is being recovered to a new ESX(i) virtual machine, the following warning appears: "Device driver 'PCI\VEN_1000&DEV_0030&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_01' for 'Windows Server 2012 R2' cannot be found." The resulting VM is unbootable.
[ABR-82514] After a machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 is backed up and recovered to a new ESX(i) virtual machine, the resulting VM does not contain valid network interface cards. The cards have to be added manually.
[ABR-82354] A backup of a virtual machine fails after the machine was migrated (via vMotion) between hosts of an ESX(i) cluster, if "Disks/Volumes" was selected in "What to back up".
[ABR-82316] A backup of a Generation 2 virtual machine with converting to a Hyper-V virtual machine fails. The following error appears: "The bus type is invalid."
[ABR-81018] If a backup contains a disk larger than 2 TB, it is not possible to add a virtual disk larger than 2 TB while configuring recovery from this backup to a new ESX(i) virtual machine.
[ABR-78181] Deploying Agent for VMware (Virtual Appliance) fails if the VMware vSphere environment contains two clusters with the same name.
[ABR-58718] An incorrect warning "Failed to take a VSS snapshot" may appear while Acronis Backup is backing up Hyper-V virtual machines.
[ABR-86319] If vCenter contains more than 2000 virtual machines, the list vms command shows only 2000 of them.

Known issues

This section describes issues that are currently known and provides solutions to avoid the issues where possible.

Installation

[ABR-25735] When installing Acronis Backup, license keys are requested one-by-one from the license server. This may cause a significant delay if the server is connected remotely.
[ABR-33952] Cannot remotely upgrade Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 Agent for Linux if the upgrade license is added to the license server but the full Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 license is not.
[ABR-40749] In very rare cases, Acronis Backup installation freezes on Windows Server 2012 R2.
When installing Acronis Backup Management Server to Windows 10, where no Microsoft SQL Server instance is pre-installed, Acronis Backup setup would deploy Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express. Although Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express is not officially supported on Windows 10 by Microsoft, such setup was verified and no known issues were found. Workaround: before running Acronis Backup setup, install Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Express or any other edition on the target machine // use pre-installed Microsoft SQL Server 2014 on the target machine or on another machine on the network.

Local management

There is no agentless single-pass disk and application backup of virtual machines (the Microsoft SQL metadata is not cataloged).
Solution: Such VMs should be backed up as physical ones. To do so, the required agents need to be installed into the guest OS.
[ABR-68306] Linux-based bootable media does not detect OCZ RevoDrive 350. Open source Linux drivers for this device are not available.
Solution: Use WinPE-based bootable media.
[ABR-66910] It is not possible to choose a LiveDrive FTP server as a backup location.
Root cause: A LiveDrive FTP server does not comply with the FTP standard concerning the "LIST" command when the command is applied to a specific file. The command execution hangs while waiting for a response from a server.
[ABR-20686] Backup finishes with the "Succeeded with warnings" result if it is manually stopped or canceled. The result should be "Stopped".
[ABR-32785] Acronis Backup Management Console displays a disk number instead of a storage space name in the Archive view tab, the Backup Content window, and the Disk management view.
[ABR-31544] No warnings in the log after recovery of files to a ReFS volume if the files have a compressed attribute. Such files are not supported.
[ABR-31547] Recovery of files to a ReFS volume fails if the files have an encrypted attribute.
[ABR-32851] It is impossible to browse and back up volumes on dynamic disks that have a sector size of 4 KB (known as dynamic Advanced Format disks).
[ABR-31348] In Windows 8/Windows Server 2012: Disks that are made members of a storage pool disappear from Acronis Backup Management Console only after restarting Agent for Windows to which Acronis Backup Management Console is connected.
[ABR-32573] The "E00060106: Failed to save data of backup being edited" error appears when mounting a ReFS volume from a disk backup in the Read only access mode.
Solution: Click Ignore.
[ABR-31884] The Backup and Recover items are not disabled in the Windows context menu if only Acronis Backup Agent for Exchange is installed on the machine. The Recover item is also not disabled in the Windows context menu if an Exchange backup is selected in the system.
[ABR-30600] The Wake-on-LAN functionality does not work in Windows 8/Windows Server 2012.
[ABR-35418] A backup of a large amount of data under Linux-based bootable media with the Linux-style volume representation fails if the destination folder name contains a space character.
[ABR-34769] If Acronis Backup is installed in a folder whose name contains non-Latin characters (for example, Cyrillic), backups fail.
[ABR-34665] If Acronis Backup is installed in a folder whose name contains non-Latin characters (for example, Kanji), generating a disaster recovery plan fails.
[ABR-34269] Under bootable media based on WinPE 4.0, the Disk Management view must be absent.
[ABR-32792] Under bootable media, an unclear error message "The file is read-only" is shown while trying to create a folder on a ReFS volume during the recovery task setup.
[ABR-65418] Acronis Startup Recovery Manager fails to start on Linux systems with the XFS file system (e.g, 64-bit CentOS 7.0).
[ABR-32106] When backing up a volume that contains an SQL database in the single-user mode and in use, the backup fails. The error is "Failed to start creating the volume snapshot."
[ABR-28582] During a recovery from a backup stored on FTP, a Linux-based bootable media reboots if the machine has less than 724 MB of RAM.
[ABR-70817] If an entire machine is recovered with reboot and the recovery is initiated from some Linux distributions (for example, Ubuntu 15.10, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2, and Debian 8.1), the operating system is unbootable.
Solution: Recover by using bootable media.
[ABR-95876] The list backups command fails under 64-bit WinPE-based bootable media. The following error appears: "Factory for a command with ID = '...' cannot be found".
Solution: Use 32-bit WinPE-based bootable media.

Centralized management

[ABR-27698] The When there is insufficient space while backing up setting for the Clean up archive parameter within the Custom backup scheme does not work if an archive is stored in a managed vault.
[ABR-29591] Storage node settings changed in the Windows registry are not applied until the storage node service restart.

Virtualization

[ABR-77204] After a Hyper-V virtual machine with a fixed MAC address is recovered to ESX(i), the resulting machine cannot be powered on.
Solution: Adjust the MAC address of the recovered machine manually.
[ABRXII-3548] Acronis Backup Command-Line Tool fails to back up individual disks or volumes of a virtual machine by using Acronis Management Server Service (--service=ams).
Solution: Back up the entire virtual machine instead (do not specify the --disk or --volume parameters).
[ABR-38392] Letters of dynamic volumes of virtual machines are shown incorrectly in the Data to Back Up window.
[ABR-38395] Letters of volumes A and B of virtual machines are shown incorrectly in the Data to Back Up window.