Failed to exclusively access <path to an other backup-location>... during consolidation ?!?
I have defined three backup locations (the first is my NAS, the other two are two USB harddisks that I keep in other locations, so that I have backups elsewhere, just in case our house burns down, gets robbed or flooded or whatever).
In my opinion these backups have nothing to do with each other (except that they are made from the same source, i.e. the same laptop). But for some strange reason the Acronis TI backups after maybe 20-30 successful backups to different locations starts failing on me each time with the message "The last backup has failed. Failed to exclusively access <path to an other backup-location>... during consolidation".
WTF has this beast to consolidate here? And why does it need to access any of the other backup locations during this process? These other locations are of course always disconnected when I do a backup (and that's on purpose, so that no virus or system failure can erase or corrupt all backups at once)!
Last time this happened Acronis support told me that this means that the internally used DB is corrupted and I had to clear and redefine all my backup settings. I am NOT willing to repeat this again! I consider it as simply not acceptable that such a product keeps corrupting its DB over and over again and one has to start all over every few months!
So, how do I rectify this? What is this "consolidation" actually doing anyway?
This is using True Image Home 2016 on Windows 10.
And BTW: I am pretty upset that Acronis does not allow me access their support any more later than 3 months after purchase of the product. That means that one is out in the rain exactly with issues like this that develop over time. If I bought a full license of a prodcut I expect support as long as I use it - at least for some reasonable period - period.
Couple of thoughts...
Are all of the backups there own backup task - I'm assuming they are, but just want to confirm.
Are all of the backups using UNIQUE names and none are overlapping with the same name? Backup tasks are stored in the database by name. There has been "weirdness" reported when people have one tassk in Acronis with a specific name, but have older backups with that same task name they wanted to mount or check with file explorer simply because the backup database would want to open the most recent instance of it as was configured in the backup database.
Backup database corruption could occur from different issues... backups being written or accessed when a system is rebooted or shutdown unexpectedly (hard shutdown, power failure, etc). Drive corruption or intervention from AV (please whitelist all backup locations in AV and the Acronis fodlers in program files and program data as well). IN some instance, you do not need to completely remove Acronis and start from scratch. You need to disable the 4 Acronis services in computer management to make sure they don't have any files locked. Then go to the HIDDEN folder C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome and rename the "database" folder to database.old or something. Restart the services and launch Acronis and it will automatically recreate the database folder with your settings and scripts. However, you'll have to run the backup again and may end up with a full backup the first time for each of them again.
Hello All,
We are investigating the issue with error "Failed to exclusively access ... during consolidation". The word "consolidation" here is not accurate, it is a leftover from older versions of the program (2014 and earlier). The database is not necessarily corrupted, it may contain invalid values in its tables, or there might be an issue with mechanics of handling those tables. We are checking all these suggestions internally on our side.
Michael, if you use "submit feedback" feature in the program (find it under "Help" tab), that would send additional diagnostic information to us about the problem. Note that we are not able to reply to each message sent that way.
Regards,
Slava