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Does Windows System Restore mess up ATI?

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(I've searched the forum, but only found questions about ATI messing up Windows System Restore, not the other way round.)

For reasons to do with trouble getting the Windows 10 1809 update (I won't go into details of the issue and attempts at resolution), on the 14th I used Windows System Restore to go back to a restore point created on 9th Feb, then last night used System Restore to go further back to a restore point created on the 6th Feb, followed by finally getting the W10 update and installing it in the wee small hours this morning. (Plus trying to solve the problem getting the update, and then today dealing with fixing two programs broken by the update, there have been a lot of computer restarts.)

During this, ATI seemed to go nuts, repeatedly trying to make extra incremental backups not according to their schedules.

I have two backup schedules configured. One is a whole PC backup that does incremental backups, once a week, of both the SSD C: drive and internal HDD D: drive in my laptop - a process that only takes a few minutes, where the last scheduled backup was on the 9th, with the next being this evening (which has happened). The second is a file-and-folder incremental backup for most of the content of a 4TB USB HD (about 2.6TB of mixed images, videos and 3D CGI assets) which takes more like 2 1/2 hours (mostly apparently slowly reading the source drive, with  a relatively short time at th end writing 20 GB or so to the 6TB USB HD both backups write to). The last regular incremental backup of this file-and-folder backup schedule was the 13th, with the next not due to the 20th. System restore is only turned on for the C drive.

Now, after I did the System Restore on the 14th, setting things back to the restore point on the 9th. ATI immediately became frantic trying, and eventually succeeding, in making a new file-and-folder incremental backup ('trying' because I had to do several restarts for other reasons, which appeared to make the two-and-a-half hour backup process restart from the beginning each time, not just resume from wherever it had got to). It was as if it had forgotten that it had done the scheduled backup on the 13th and was trying to catch up as soon as possible. And after I did the System Restore yesterday (15th) going back to the 6th Feb restore point, ATI took off like a rocket, did a whole PC incremental backup, as if forgetting the one it did on the 9th, and kept trying to do another file-and-folder one, now apparently forgetting the one it did the day before as well as the one on the 13th - and maybe even the one it did on the 6th. And then, after the W10 update, it did yet ANOTHER of the 2 1/2 hour file-and-folder incremental backups. Since then it has settled down and just done the whole PC one that's always been scheduled for this evening.

I am ... uncertain as to what state these backups are actually in as the behaviour and results in response to the System Restores (and System Restore is only enabled on the C: drive, not any of the others) is contradictory. On the one hand, ATI started extra incremental backups, not according to the schedules, on both scheduled backup schemes as if it had forgotten it had done the ones since each restore point - 1 extra whole PC backup, and 3 extra file-and-folder backups of the USB HD. But on the other hand, all of the backups, original and extra, on both schemes are still displaying in ATI with their actual dates and times, the files are all there on the destination drive, and the sizes for each extra one, given they are all incremental, look ... well, the right order of magnitude given when they happened and when the last one happened, and much smaller then the normal ones. I am puzzled. If, after each system restore, ATI thought the last one or two regular backups since the restore point hadn't happened (and I can imagine the system restore resetting ATI's data on what it has done before in data files on the system disk), surely it would have done the new, extra incremental backups based on the last regular incremental backup before the restore point, so these extra incremental files would be much bigger as they would replace the previous ones. But if, on the other hand, ATI still knows, after the system restores, about the backups done since the restore points, which would appear to be the case from the sizes of all the incremental backups and the fact it is still listing them at the times and dates they happened, then why is it doing these extra, unscheduled backups at all?

As soon as I'm sure this W10update 1809 is OK and that I've fixed all problems with other programs it may have caused, I'll do a new full PC backup and start a new incremental backup chain and delete the old one - it doesn't take that long. But I'm concerned about the backup of the 2.6TB of data on the USB HD. It takes over 20 hours to do a full backup, and I'd really rather not go through that again right now. But after the 3 extra non-scheduled  incremental backups, and the apparent contradiction between what ATI did (the fact that it did them at all) and the results, I'm really not sure where I am (or where ATI is) with that.

 

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David, when you do a System Restore, you are restoring lots of files & folders back to the state that they held on the date(s) the restore points were created, and this in turn can include information used by ATI that is stored in the C:\ProgramData\Acronis folder structure.

If this Acronis data is reverted back in time to an earlier date and you have files stored on your target backup drive that were created after this date, then ATI no longer 'knows' about those later backup files because it is now working from the information held as at the restore back date.

This normally results in backup files where the file names have been given extra numeric values, i.e. v1-2.tib because there already was a v1.tib file present.  This is explained in the ATI 2019 User Guide: Backup file naming section.

If you are creating a new backup, and there is already a file with the same name, the program does not delete the old file, but adds to the new file the "-number" suffix, for example, my_documents_inc_b2_s2_v1-2.tib.