Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online Initial Seeding Step-by-Step Guide

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1 Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online Initial Seeding Step-by-Step Guide Introduction Initial Seeding is an optional service for customers who want to back up large amounts of data online. If the size of your first full backup is larger than 10GB and if your available internet bandwidth is less than 1Mbit/sec, then we recommend that you use the Initial Seeding service to upload your first backup to Acronis Online Storage. By using Initial Seeding, you can write your first backup on a removable hard drive and then ship it to the datacenter for easy and fast uploading, thus avoiding the need to send a lot of data via a slow and potentially costly internet connection of your local ISP. Initial Seeding is a paid service. It is licensed for one time usage for one backup. You cannot reuse a once used Initial Seeding license or assign it to a different machine. So please make sure you read and understand the guide below to avoid incorrect use of your license. This step-by-step guide will help you successfully create and send your Initial Seeding backup. 1. Prerequisites You will need Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Update 3 or higher version installed in order to create an Initial Seeding backup as well as to use all other Online Backup functionality. To use it however you do not need a license key for Acronis Backup & Recovery as long as you have a trial or paid subscription for Online Backup. Before using the Initial Seeding service, you should already have an active subscription for Acronis Backup & Recovery Online. If you are currently using a trial subscription, make sure that you also have a paid subscription available and assigned to the machine for which you will be doing Initial Seeding. This will help avoid problems accessing your online backup after Initial seeding service is complete. Initial Seeding requires a separate license. You can get a license from your reseller or from the Acronis Online Store. An Initial Seeding license looks similar to a subscription for Online Backup: LWKUFXN6-HP443Z5X-CF553FBD-3GZ3Y33E-HJA66QU4-LATXVQTB-X4F6H8VA-WXR3JHES You will also need a removable hard drive where you will create your initial seeding backup. This hard drive should meet Acronis requirements: it must be a USB, ATA, SATA or IDE disk formatted with FAT32 or NTFS. Drives not meeting this requirements may not be processed. For full list of requirements please refer to Make sure you have read and complied with all requirements for the Initial Seeding service described in our online documentation: You will also need to be familiar with how recognized shipment companies like UPS, FedEx or DHL operate and how to order and track shipment with them. Failing to comply with Acronis requirements may lead to Acronis being unable to perform the service.

2 2. We strongly do not recommend using any other shipment company than UPS, FedEx or DHL and Acronis cannot guarantee reliability of service when drives are shipped through other than these companies.register a license for Initial Seeding. Like all other subscriptions for Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online, this license is managed from the MyAccount page of Acronis.com. Do not attempt to activate this license in the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 product, such attempts will fail. Log in to your Account, go to Product Registration and paste the Initial Seeding license, then click Register. If you now go to Online Backup->for business, and click Initial Seeding tab you will see your license: You have one Initial Seeding license available for use. 3. Obtain a removable hard drive to write the backup to. Your hard drive should have enough space for storing the backup which you will create. If the hard drive is large enough, and you need to create several Initial Seeding backups, you can use the same drive for all of them. However we strongly do not recommend that you send archives on several drives to Acronis

3 as this may result in service delays, especially if you request a return shipment. Make sure that your drive is a common one and conforms to Acronis requirements at Choosing a drive that is easy to pack for shipment is also an important consideration. 4. Create the Initial Seeding backup on the removable drive. This is an important step. If you make a mistake or change your mind in the middle of the process, you might need to call Acronis Support which will delay your Initial Seeding process. Make sure you know exactly what you are doing. Attach your removable drive and make sure as what volume it is recognized in the system (F:\, G:\ etc.). Start the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 product. Go to Backup plans and tasks. Click Create new. Choose what you want to backup in What to backup. You can do either a file or disk image backup. IMPORTANT: make sure that you have an online backup subscription assigned to the machine you are going to create the initial seeding backup for. If you have no subscription assigned, initial seeding backup will fail. To check your online backup subscription click on the following link in Create Backup window. If you have not yet assigned an online backup subscription, do it in your account at Acronis.com now. (As a prerequisite to Initial Seeding, you must have an online backup subscription) Then Choose your online storage in Where to backup. You may be asked for your credentials to the online storage at this point. Now you will need to set up the archive name. Make sure you remember the name, because you will need it later for setting up incremental backups online to the same archive.

4 Proceed to How to backup and set Backup Scheme to Initial Seeding. Specify the path to your removable drive (shown as D:\ below) by clicking Full backup->change. IMPORTANT: Make sure you set Archive validation to Never as shown below. This is a workaround for a known issue described in We will run validation as a separate task in the following steps. Lastly, we recommend that you password protect and encrypt your archive, because it will be sent via a third party shipment service. Acronis provides encrypted SSL connections for all your online backups, but in order to protect your hard drive while it is shipped over the air, we advise you to encrypt it. Go to Backup options, select Change and in the Options dialog check Set password for the archive, fill in and confirm your password, then choose encryption algorithm and click OK. Again click OK in the Create backup plan window. Creation of your initial Seeding backup will now start!

5 Please scroll to next page for further steps. 5. Validate the Initial Seeding backup created in previous step. Validating the archive before shipping the drive will ensure that it does not contain errors that would prevent uploading it to your online storage. Create and run a separate validation task for the archive you made in step 4. Go to Backup plans and tasks. Click Create new->validation task. Set Item to Archive. Click Archive->Change and browse for your initial seeding archive on the removable drive. You will be asked to enter your password. Enter it and click OK twice. Validation task for your initial seeding archive will be now start.

6 Now you can go to your account at Acronis.com and see that status of the Initial seeding has changed. The Initial Seeding license has been used and is no longer available it has converted to an order assigned to the machine you did initial seeding backup for. When you click Details you will see shipping address to send the drive to. Copy the address and use it in the next step. Please scroll to next page for further steps. 6. If you need to cancel the initial seeding At this time it is still possible to cancel your Initial Seeding and make the license available again. If you need to do so, go to your account, click Online backup->for Business and go to Initial Seeding tab. Find the machine you want to cancel the initial seeding for, expand information about it by clicking +

7 Then click Problems with order Then click Cancel order After a subsequent confirmation dialog your initial seeding will be cancelled and license will become available again. 7. Arrange shipment of your hard drive to Acronis. You will need to place an order with the shipment company and package the hard drive as described in documentation at When your drive is collected by the shipment company and you receive the Tracking ID, go to your account, click Online backup->for Business and go to Initial Seeding tab. Find the machine you want to cancel the initial seeding for and click Mark order as shipped.

8 In the next window select your shipment company and input your tracking number, then click OK 8. Track fulfillment of your service Until the drive is received by datacenter, you are able to track the shipment via your tracking code at the shipment company website. After the drive is received by the datacenter, you will receive notifications when it goes through the following steps: - drive started processing by datacenter - upload of your archive was completed - drive was shipped back (in case you provided a return shipment label) - initial seeding resulted in error If you want to submit an additional query about your initial seeding, you can do it in your account at Acronis.com. Go to Online backup->for Business and go to Initial Seeding tab. Find the machine you want to cancel the initial seeding for, expand information about it by clicking +.Then click Problems with order and click Submit a request via web form. 9. Initial Seeding service levels

9 In order to set your expectations for the Initial Seeding service, below we provide guidelines for the duration of different stages of the initial seeding process. - Creating an initial seeding backup will take approximately as much time as creating a regular offline backup of the same data. It may as well depend on the speed of your removable hard drive, its connection to the machine you are backing up, and the machine s overall performance. - Shipping the hard drive to the Acronis datacenter depends completely on the shipping company and is beyond control of Acronis. Normally shipment companies provide multiple types of shipment from overnight to several days, at different costs. - Processing the drive in the datacenter can take a few days before and a few days after the actual upload of the initial seeding archive. We aim to turn drives around within one week, but do not provide a binding commitment on that currently. - Uploading the initial seeding archive depends on the archive size and will normally run at a speed of 20-30GB/hour. This means that a 100GB archive will be uploaded within 3-5 hours maximum. - Response time for support requests related to initial seeding is usually within 3 working days. Acronis does not provide any service level guarantees at the moment for the initial seeding, but we make our bets reasonable effort to provide service that meets expectations of the most customers. 10. Where to find additional information. Acronis Backup and Recovery Online Evaluation Guide Documentation for Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online can be found at Knowledge base articles for Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Online can be found at If you need further assistance with your Acronis product, please visit our support portal at