"URI is empty" error
I'm having difficulty with backing up.
I do a manual, weekly backup onto an external hard drive. Initially today, the backup kept stopping, and saying it would restart in a minute. This became an endless cycle.
I eventually decided to start from scratch and formatted the drive. Same error message, and this time when clicking on the"Full Weekly Backup" icon on the True Image main screen in order to check the destination, I now also get a pop up error message that says the "given URI is empty."
I rebooted the computer and tried again. Same "URI" error message and same backup stopping problem.
I should add that I rotate my external hard drives for these weekly backups, and I just connected one of the three others -- and get the same "The given URI is empty" error message. And further when I try to do a backup, it says "The last backup has stopped. It will be restarted in one minute. The backup cannot be started. Plug in the external drive containing the files of this backup."
I use Windows 10, 64-bit.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
UPDATE: Though I still don't know what caused the initial problem, I remembered a suggestion that had been given to me here a while back on a somewhat similar issue -- to clone the settings and delete the original backup. I did that, and things appear to be working now.
Bob
Steve,
Thanks for your note. I've been rotating external drives for probably six years or so, and generally it's worked fine 98.4% of the time. (And yes, I've learned to re-select Destination each time.) When I find it screws up is when I've done something screwy -- in this case, I deleted a backup, which it couldn't find. But the good news is that the fix I used -- which I got from you several months back (thanks again...) -- helped resolve things.
By the way, I'm not quite sure what you mean by " the recommendation will always be to have One Task per each unique Backup Drive." Perhaps I described what I do poorly (or not), but I sort of thought that that's what I do. I have a Weekly Backup setting. Each Saturday, I put an external drive in, select the Destination to be safe, and run the backup. Then the next week, I put a different external drive in, and run through the same process with the Weekly Backup setting. I use different external drives each week in case one gets corrupted. Is what I'm doing something that falls under your " One Task per each unique Backup Drive." Or are you describing something different? I guess it's the "One Task" that's I'm uncertain what you mean.
Thanks much, again.
Bob
Bob, in essence the recommendation here would be as follows:
Backup_task_1 that backs up to Backup_drive_1
Backup_task_2 that backs up to Backup_drive_2
Backup_task_3 that backs up to Backup_drive_3
If doing the above, then there should be no need to have to reselect the Destination for any of the tasks provided the drive for that task is the one being used each time.
This has come up a number of times in the forums, and one user, John, worked with me to create a process that he is now using to rotate between 2 different drives, that he has documented in a PDF document posted in forum topic: Acronis Backup (BU) Using Rotating USB Drives - posted in the Best Practices Forum.
An alternative method would be to manage this whole backup process outside of the ATI GUI by running a PowerShell script from the Windows Task Scheduler, where the script decides what backup task to run according to which drive is connected (as identified by a small text file on the drive). See the attached MultiDrives.zip file with a copy of a working PowerShell script that I wrote a little while back for this purpose and which works fine when tested. You will need to modify some of the initial lines in the script to match your own system settings.