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Halfway into a 6 DAY BACKUP and...

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I got Acronis 2013 and was doing a full backup of my photos. It said it would take nearly 7 days. So I've left my computer on and the software running. Woke up this morning to see ""Operations are in progress, please wait" and I'm unable to do anything. (http://kb.acronis.com/content/19016)

It would appear that my computer went to shutdown and now it's locked on this splash screen. Drives are still blinking so it seems the backup is still in progress. The problem is now my computer is in accessible and I've got 3+ days to go.

Is there a way to get to Task Manager or get back to the desktop from this splash screen? I don't want to have to wait or force shutdown and possibly corrupt my drive. PLEASE HELP!

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David,
This is likely a validation task which is set to be performed by default at the conclusion of a full back up. The behavior is as designed, but can be disabled in ABR 11 builds 17437 and >. This is what you saw in the KB article you referenced.

There has been much contention about this feature, and it hasn't been received too well generally. The behavior cannot be modified in ATIH 2012 and I am not in front of a PC running 2013 at the moment. You can disable Validation under options a task or operation so it does not occur, or so it can be scheduled to run when you want it to. You can validate manually as well. I am not aware of a way to exit the operation once it has started. If you need to access your PC, it will have to be hard shut down.

Please see pages 58 and 67 of the 2013 User Guide for examples.

This can also be caused by an on-going backup (or sync) to the Acronis Cloud. When (if) the online backup or sync finishes (including any consolidation of the "cloud" files, your system will then shutdown or restart.

Additionally, this can be caused by local backup tasks running a scheduled consolidation if the backup files are very large.

You can not stop this behavior, but you can press and hold the power button in/down for more than 3 seconds to "force power off" your system. This may result in minor file system errors (easily correctable by running the Windows disk checking utility.)

Restarting your system after forcing it to shutdown will possibly create problems with the online backup or sync that may be taking place and the online backup or sync may, or may not, resume from where it left off.

Thank you shadowsports. Any idea what I can do to speed up the backup process? It is a differential backup and the initial backup was made with an older version of Acronis. I thought it would be faster as it's just backing up the changes but it appears it's taking just a long as a full backup. I've got it set to high priority and normal compression. The files I'm backing up are on a Drobo (external storage) and the backup is going on to another external drive. I suppose maybe it's slowed by both devices running on the USB but 6 days seems crazy for this amount of backup. Would there be any negative effects if I were to backup to an internal drive and then move the backup to the external? Afraid it won't reference the backup properly in the future.

You are correct about the USB transfer speed being the limiting factor between the units. In addition, most photos are stored in a compressed format (unless they are RAW) and using Acronis to back up the photos using compression slows the process down further as the photos (if already compressed) having to be compressed again (with little or no additional compression) slows the backup task even more.

If you created the initial full backup using an older version and are using 2013 to try and create a differential, most likely you are getting a full backup again.

You may want to consider an alternative to using a backup imaging program to back up you photos. Another option would be to use something like SyncBack (Free/SE/Pro) to copy/sync the photos from one drive to the other. The SE and Pro version have features that allow automated sync in both directions, as well as some version retention options/logging.