Nonstop backup to NAS stopped after pc reboot
I have been testing Acronis for a few days before deciding to buy it but have bumped into some issues with nonstop backup, one of the feature which I am most interested about.
I have setup a nonstop backup to write to my NAS, the initial backup completed successfully and runs in the background with no issues. After I shutdown my pc and powered it on again I can see the acronis nonstop trying to consolidate but then fails and stops the nonstop backup completely. Tried starting it manuallly and same issue. I can remove the settings and recreate a new nonstop backup and it would work again but after rebooting pc the backup stops working.
The normal incremental schedules work fine backing up daily with no issues at all. Only the nonstop backup.
I am currently backing up the OS hdd drive on my pc. Running Windows 8.1 pro 64bit.
My NAS has a static ip.
I haven't tried with internal one yet as I have no free space to use. I'll try to use external usb disk when I'm able to get it back from work.
The interface is not very helpful either in diagnosing the issue. Just a stupid exclamation mark. Where can I see the error message?
To access the log file, you need to enable email notifications and then tick the checkbox against 'add complete log file....'. You will then be sent an email with the logifle attached which might shed some light.
Long time Acronis user.
My 2015 NonStop Backup of C: is stopping more often than 2014 did, pretty well a daily occurrence now! If I try to restart it, after five minutes or so I see it isn't running and the "starting" notification icon has disappeared. The only way to get it running is to delete and redefine the NonStop. It is backing up to a motherboard connected SATA3 drive which works fine for scheduled Acronis backups.
My C: is a SSD and I do not defrag it so that's not a cause. It does get trimmed but that time never is near the time Acronis "NonStop" stops.
The other head scratcher was originally finding where NonStop was defined. I guess if it was called often scheduled rather than NonStop it would have been easier found - it certainly isn't really a non-stopping task any more.
Not impressed. I should have learned from previous years, it takes one or two updates before we do enough beta-testing to stabilize the product. Wait, this was a release product, not beta.
It may finally be time to start considering a different product... I do like the concepts of what Acronis is trying to do but testing the product is beginning to waste too much of my time. Luckily I don't need to dig into the NonStop backup very often but what are the odds that it had shut down the backup and I hadn't noticed. I shouldn't need to set up a mail message or continuously look at the notification icons color to find out if it stopped backing up.
GaryG
Garyg,
The next time the task stop, check in Services.msc and see if the actual service has become stopped as well.
Hello Colin
It did stop a couple more times, the services were still showing as running.
...BUT...
I may have found the cause with a some other trouble shooting which might have been Acronis created.
One morning, I opened Windows Explorer and saw my C: drive flagged in Red - short of storage! Overnight, I had lost over 160GB of storage yet I saw no sign of what had eaten it. The overnight image was the normal size and selecting all the directories and files then checking properties, all was normal. Very strange. Lots of Googling (actually Binging), I eventually found "http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2008/07/03/ntfs-misreports-…" and did some reading. I read the last item describing vssadmin and ran it. It was showing my Shadow Copy Storage was using all the missing space! I had a current image so it was time to experiment! I did a Delete Shadows and after a minute or two, all my space had been returned.
That got me thinking. I have had a few lockups recently that required brute force reboots so perhaps that started the Shadow Storage problem. Naturally after all that fiddling, my non-stop had stopped again so I deleted and redefined it yet again. This time, I looked at the exclusions (which previously I had not selected). I saw System Volume Information as one of the excludes. That rang a bell, that is where the shadow files are stored! I assume my previous non-stop changes had possibly been trying to back up the shadow changes and possibly been causing a recursive shadow storage problem.
Since I started my latest non-stop a few days ago with the default list of items being excluded, it has been behaving itself; that's now about 62 hours without stopping. Fingers are still crossed but including the System Volume Information in the definition could have been the cause of the problem.
GaryG
Interesting Garry, you know that VSS can be switched off (from a TI point of view) in options.