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TI Can't Find Volume & terminates while trying to validate

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I have TI Home 2010 & Windows XP (SP3). I schedule backups starting with a full backup & then an incremental every 2nd day, during the night. About once every 2 weeks, I find that the backup was made, but the the validation was not done successfully. The message is "terminated by user".

When I try to select the last incremental & validate it, after a couple of minutes, I get a message "Specify the location of volume X", where X is a number. I try to do so by navigating to the archive that I'm trying to validate, but I immediately get the same message "Specify the location of volume X". It says I have 10 minutes or it will terminate...which it does. It's very frustrating.

Does anyone have a solution to this?
Thanks, Phil

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Hi Phil,
Can you give us some additional information please. You are backing up to an internal/external drive?? If external, does it have an assigned drive letter or does windows assign this on the fly? It sounds like the path is changing and TI doesn't know where to find the .tib you want to validate?

How many incremental backup files is based on the last full backup?

Ultimately, you will proably need to stat over with a new backup scheme but some changes of options may be needed--depending upon your response.

Also, the editing or changing of a task can cause issues.

Do you know whether any of your settings involve consolidation?

Thanks to Grover & you for responding so quickly. I am backing up to an external drive connected by a USB port. It does have an assigned letter. I have 2 external drives named "Backup1 (D:)" & "Backup2 (E:)" respectively. I use only 1 of them at a time for a couple months. I make a full system backup, followed by incremental backups every 2nd day, until I get 30-40 of them.

Then I start the other external drive & repeat the process. I can get 2 complete archive sets on each drive. Then I delete the oldest.

Most of the time, I have no problem. But once every 2 weeks or so, I check the log & see that it says "terminated by user" during validation, yet I can still mount the drive & copy files, if necessary. Then, when I try to validate, I get the message about not being able to locate Volume # & the threat to terminate.

There are many times that when this has happened, I used a utility called "Unlocker", which unlocks the volume from Windows Explorer. Often, this helped, although sometimes I had to do this several times. This last time, I navigated to Volume 21 (the one it couldn't find), & it told me it was corrupt (first time that happened). However, I started to validate that volume, but I stopped after about 12 minutes because, when there's a problem, it has always happened within about 8 minutes.

I hope I've given enough detail. This is really puzzling.

Oh, I do not consolidate any archives & use normal compression.

Thank you both for your time & knowledge.

I would strongly recommend that you reduce the number of incremantal--perhaps by 50%. That is subjective amount but the point being that when a restore of an inc backup is made--for example inc #35, the restore must read and restore the full plus all 35 inc files. If #20 happens to not be readable, then then restore to #19 is the only alternative. Therefore, more frequently full backups offers more safety of data.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/40810

Thanks, Grover. I can see your point. The reason I do so many incremental backups is that I haven't had to do a restore in about 8 years & full backups take a lot of room & more time. One of my externals is 232GB & the other is 149GB. A full backup takes about 50GB, so I can only fit about 2 archive chains by the time I do the incrementals. I will rethink my backups, though, & appreciate your advice.

Maybe consider a larger storage disk.
An external usb disk costs about $100 for a 1 or 2 Terrrabyte size disk.

Thanks, that's a good idea. Although I'm still puzzled why TI all of a sudden can't find what seems like a perfectly good archive, but then once it does, it works for awhile until it has trouble with another archive.