can avast interfere with acronis true image or macrium backup apps?

i am trying to make a image backup of my hard drive, and keep getting a device is busy or write access denied. both companies are saying my anti virus could be causing the conflict that is causing the dvd write to fail and to disable to AV while making the backup. before i try it, could avast be causing the dvd writes to fail?

I have been using Acronis True Image (currently version 11) for several years along with avast as have most of those I support. None of us have encountered any conflicts between the two.

Short answer, no.

The drive is busy I would say is way outside any possible avast influence.

The write access denied on avast folder/file locations is a possibility as avast self-defence would block changes to avast files, so we would need to know more on what areas are write access denied. However, if this is just the DVD location then, no avast wouldn’t be involved in blocking write access.

I use Drive Image and make backups to another partition and avast doesn’t block anything, I occasionally burn these back-up images to DVD with no problem, but I don’t back-up directly to DVD.

There are many forum members that use True Image and if there were problems, I’m sure we would have seen post about it.

thanks for the answers. i can see a error in the event viewer, the drive works fine except for when it goes to write a image file to the dvd. i will keep testing the drive with any other programs that write to dvd.

No problem, glad I could help.

You could see if there is a new driver available for the DVD drive or try searching google on the error in the log viewer.

Welcome to the forums.

Hi dodge03, I use macrium reflect free on my vista 64bit machine. I normally image to an external drive but I did try the dvd write option and had no problem writing to dvd, so I don’t believe avast is conflicting with the process. Hope this helps,tim

Sorry to hijack the thread, but my question may help the OP also. Since Acronis can run pre- and post-commands before/after the backup, is there any command line option to stop (turn off) the On-Access Protection (like right click on the ‘a’ ball in the system tray)? This way I can turn off on access scanning to improve the backup performance and then turn it back on once the backup completes.

Hi, sure just right click ‘a’ tray icon then choose stop on access protection.

Umm, I was looking for a command line option. I know about right clicking the icon. I even used that as an example in my own post!

As far as I’m aware there is no command line option to try to create one in a batch file, etc. you could do that to netstop services, etc. but then you would bump into the avast self-defence module. So using the right click stop on-access protection is the only easy means that won’t fall foul of the avast self-defence. I really don’t believe it is necessary though.

Your True Image software will be operating at a very low level an may well not have much in the way of interference from avast. You can monitor the avast icon as if it is scanning it will be rotating.

I never disable avast when doing an image back-up with Drive Image (DI) and aside from the scanning of the DI files as the program opens there is very little interaction by avast as the backup image is created.

For on-demand scans I do exclude my drive image backup files from scanning - Program Settings, Exclusions.

Because my image files are likely to be around 2GB I exclude the Folder my images are stored in e.g. F:\Drive-Images*. This * wildcard just excludes the files in that folder and not the partition or drive so there is less of a hole in your security. I could go a step further and just exclude the image file type in that folder, e.g. F:\Drive-Images*.v21 closing ant possible security hole further.

I always scan my system (avast, SAS and MBAM) before making an image backup so I can be reasonably sure what is going into the drive image is clean, making it less of an issue if the image files aren’t scanned when I do and on-demand scan.

[quote author=RNfromTN link=topic=39835.msg334037#msg334037 date=1225913300]

??? sorry, interpreted meaning wrong.