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Flip between two External USB drives depending on which one is onsight

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Just purchased a Dell laptop with Windows 8.

Downloaded a trial of A2013 TI

Have two USB drives. I will always have a drive plugged in but couldnt tell you which one. A drive will be plugged in while the other one will be offsight. Will flip between the two drives whenever I remember to do it. Usually around once a month.

I want to run a nightly incremental backup to image the hard disk.

I am trying to replicate that process so have both drives right now.

I have tried two methods.

Method 1 -
Setup each external drive to have its own letter. Setup two identical backup jobs. One for drive 1 and one for drive 2.
Problem - When the two jobs start that night, of course one drive is not plugged in. So from that time forward, Acronis is ALWAYS trying to do the backup for the missing external drive. The little taskbar icon is always spinning with backup saying 0%. You go into the TI UI and it shows the backup job as queued. Under advanced Error handling, I do not have "Repeat attempt if a backup fails" checked.

Method 2 -
Both drives have the same drive letter. One backup job. When the job goes to run the second time with the 2nd external drive plugged in, it complains: "Error occurred while opening the file. Please insert the last media of the archive and click Retry to continue..."

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The method 1 is the right method with ATI products. If the drive is not plugged in, the backup task should simply fail. Does the task with the plugged in disk completes normally at all?

I agree with Pat. Each drive should have its own permanently assigned drive letter and its own backup task.

Yes guys, the connected drive backs up correctly. Just concerned with the failed job continuing to try to backup. While the Acronis TI notification icon spins and says 0%, I watched task manager and seems the acronis TI blips system with HD and CPU access while 'queueing'. To me, this means it will always be trying as there will only ever be one drive attached.

Anything I should check to get the backup to just try once and fail besides under that Error settings section?

Okay, unchecked a setting that said something about resume process when media attached. When the job went to run, a little ballon sat there saying gonna wait 10 minutes before failing. Found that 10 minute setting in yet another menu area and saw I was I was stuck with 10 minutes as the lowest. After 10 minutes when the balloon went away i opened ATI and it said that last backup canceled by timeout. No continuously waiting to try and do the back up nor system try icon so looks like it all works.