Backing up to external removable eSATA drive
I've been using Acronis for disk imaging for years, recently purchased new ATIH 2012. I've never used it for backing up my files, which is what I'm planning to start doing. However, it seems ATIH doesn't play well with eSATA drives that get unplugged on regular basis. If the drive is unplugged, ATIH throws an error, and then won't automatically start missed backup upon reconnecting the drive. I saw in help file there is a feature to run missed backups when USB drives get plugged in. How can I make ATIH do the same with my eSATA drives? Or is there another Acronis product that would work this way with eSATA drives? I would like it to be as automated as possible (somewhat like "plug and backup").
And other question related to block level backup (so called delta compression). It works very well using Nonstop Backup, however, it doesn't appear to be the case with regular backups. Is there another Acronis product that allow block level backup for all types of backup?
By the way, when restoring previous versions of Nonstop Backup, it creates full-size file from the delta (understandable, it needs some space temporarily) but doesn't compress it down to delta afterwards. Is it an expected behaviour?
Having the same problem. I have a removable eSATA drive and I am on laptop.
If only ATIH 2012 could recognize that an eSATA drive is a removable drive and give me the option to run the scheduled backup only when the destination device is attached. Same here. ATIH 2012 is giving me an annoying error message when the eSATA drive is not connected
If I click on the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the system tray, the eSATA drive is listed, so Windows 7 has no problems recognizing the eSATA drive as a removable drive. That's definitely an oversight from Acronis not to recognize an eSATA drive as removable.
In general, eSata drives are not considered removable drives. More recent controllers enable eSata drives to be hot plug and play, but there are often cases where Windows does not find the drive and you have to trigger a scan for hardware changes to mount it. Your mileage will vary depending on your OS and your controllers.
For all intent and purposes, an eSata disk is similar to an internal disk. You would have to go to USB 3.0 to find similar speed and a standard removable drive.
Hello all,
Thank you for your comments and your kind help.
I wanted to thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. I will forward your comments to our Testing Lab so that we can work on it.
Please let me know if you have additional questions.
Thank you.
@Pat L, that's a good point. Not all systems will recognize eSATA as external, but by definition eSATA stands for external-SATA as opposed to straight SATA that is the internal type.
@Anton, thanks for having Acronis look into it. I've been using every version of ATIH since ATIH 11. That error message that I've been getting since ATIH 11 is not an error message, but simply ATIH failing to recognize that the backup drive is external and not connected at the time. It's a step in the right direction with ATIH 2012 recognizing USB external drives. It needs to be extended to include eSATA removable drives as well.