Problem with Acronis or Me?

[West Swan]

Hello,

I will try and provide all the information needed

I have a Windows 7 64bit computer and using the latest version of VirtualBox I created Clients including XP (32Bit), Vista (32Bit), Windows 8 (64Bit) and Ubuntu 12.04 (64Bit).

These all worked perfectly. Some things I did with each client was apply all the latest updates and defragment them all. I also defragged the Windows 7 Host using MyDefrag which places all the most often used files at the beginning of the disk. I've used this program for years but never when I had any virtual machines. After doing all this everything still worked fine.

I then used Acronis 2013 to create an image and a couple of weeks later recovered that image only to find that half the clients (Vista and Ubuntu) no longer worked. There was no error message they just wouldn't start - no trying to load or anything).

So I set it all up again from scratch, created a new image and then (for fun) recovered that image. This time XP didn't start.

Is there an issue with Acronis and Virtualbox or could the moving of files via using MyDefrag on the host have caused isssues or perhaps defragging the virtual machines etc?

Not sure how I should attack finding the cause here.

Hope I've explained this ok.

Regards,

Paul

[mpack]

Your description is rather light on precise error messages. "Does not start" doesn't really help much.

However...

I'm not aware that there should be any issue with Acronis or MyDefrag. A VM is just a piece of host software that uses files. There's nothing magical or unusual about it, except that the files tend to be very large.

I use Acronis, but I keep my large VDI files on a 2nd data drive which is not imaged by Acronis. Instead I back these up manually to a USB drive.

Unless you can pin down that a particular file has been corrupted (e.g. using a file comparison tool) then it will be hard to speculate on what caused that corruption. At the moment I would guess pilot error. I would guess that perhaps there's an option in Acronis to skip files larger than X, and you're falling foul of that. I know that Acronis is smart enough to segment backups stored on a FAT32 drive, so that can't be it.

I don't use MyDrag, but bugs aside I don't see how it can be relevant, assuming it is allowed to run to completion.

[West Swan]

Your description is rather light on precise error messages. "Does not start" doesn't really help much.

However...

I'm not aware that there should be any issue with Acronis or MyDefrag. A VM is just a piece of host software that uses files. There's nothing magical or unusual about it, except that the files tend to be very large.

I use Acronis, but I keep my large VDI files on a 2nd data drive which is not imaged by Acronis. Instead I back these up manually to a USB drive.

Unless you can pin down that a particular file has been corrupted (e.g. using a file comparison tool) then it will be hard to speculate on what caused that corruption. At the moment I would guess pilot error. I would guess that perhaps there's an option in Acronis to skip files larger than X, and you're falling foul of that. I know that Acronis is smart enough to segment backups stored on a FAT32 drive, so that can't be it.

I don't use MyDrag, but bugs aside I don't see how it can be relevant, assuming it is allowed to run to completion.

Hi and thanks for replying.

Basically as I alluded to in my original postthere was no error message. I tried to start the virtual machine/s and nothing happened No error message. No attempting to start. Nothing.

In Acronis I choose to verify the backup and it passed verification.

I like your idea of keeping the VDI files separate on an external drive and will do that in future as well.

Cheers,

Paul

[mpack]

I would rather doubt that nothing at all happened. No VM window opened? Such a thing would imply a problem with the VirtualBox program rather than any VM.

My 2nd drive is internal, not external. I would be wary about using external drives "live" because of the danger of unplugging them while the VM is running. Also on Windows hosts there is the issue of external drive letters changing, messing up the VM registration. I do have large external drives, which I only use for backup and transport.