Situation

You have a client that is attempting to uninstall Acronis (to remove the product, to reinstall, to upgrade the agent version, etc), but while following the normal steps, you encounter an error that prevents the uninstallation from going through. This behavior is commonly seen when you have a very old agent on the machine. 

Determine the objective

The process you will follow will depend on the end-goal of the customer. 

  1. Acronis should be wiped from the machine:
    1. Attempt to remove Acronis through the Windows Control Panel. 
    2. If it fails, use the Acronis Cleanup Utility.
  2. Acronis will continue to be used on the machine:
    • See detaills below.

Removing Acronis while protecting the use of the original archive slice

These steps should allow the agent to be reinstalled with the latest version while ensuring that future backups are added to the ones already existing for the device.

  1. On the affected device, open the registry editor.
    1. Navigate to the following section of the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Acronis\BackupAndRecovery\Settings\MachineManager
    2. Take note of and copy the values for these two keys: InstanceID and MMSCurrentMachineID        
  2. Run a manual backup and wait for its completion to ensure you have a good recovery point.                          
  3. Use the Acronis Cleanup Utility to remove the agent from the machine.
  4. Once done, download the latest agent from the console and install it.
  5. After the installation completes, uninstall the agent, but this time going through the Windows control panel:
    • Go to Programs and Features, right-click Acronis Cyber Protect, and then select Uninstall.
  6. Once the agent is uninstalled, reopen the registry editor and go to the same location as in step 1 and replace the values of InstanceID  and MMSCurrentMachineID with the ones gathered from step 1.                                             
  7. Install the Acronis agent again.

Keywords

MMS, InstanceID, Cleanup Tool, Acronis