ATI 2020: Automated starts always fail with "network share unavailable"; manual backups always work
This has been going on for a few weeks now, and I have a friend with the same problem. My NAS drive is online basically 24x7, but my automatically scheduled backups fail every time with "network share not available". A manual backup right after that always succeeds. I have deleted and re-created backups multiple times, but the problem persists. The PC is running Windows 11.
Anyone else have this problem that started recently? Or within the last few months (like 2 or 3)?
Sure: these are incremental backups, once per day. Full version after every 13 incrementals; store no more than 2 version chains.
Connection is via WiFi, share is \\NASname\folder, accessed with NAS admin account. Has been working flawlessly for, no exaggeration, years. WiFi AP is up 24x7, and this laptop is within 5 feet of it when the backups are failing.
To correct my original post, the message is actually "The network share is inaccessible".
Jim, this reminds me of a problem I had with ATI 2019. Very similar in that I would get an error (which was not explained well) but it would always work if I manually ran the backup job. You can read about it here.
The bottom line for me, after trying everything I could think of over many months, was to eliminate the Acronis Scheduler from the process. It's been working flawlessly since. If the same bug exists in 2020, that may explain it.
So you had to write a script to automate your backups because the Acronis scheduler didn't work? Yuck. I'm going to restart the scheduler(2) service and see if that helps. This is working great on a system with wired Ethernet, albeit Windows 10, so I will also hook up my laptop to wired Ethernet to see if it helps.
Nope. Still failed. I'm at a loss for what's going on at this point.
Jim, are these backups Disk and Partition, or are they File and Folders?
In my case, it was only Disk and Partition backups that failed. Recreating the tasks did not help. Using different folders on the NAS did not help. The failure did not occur 100% of the time, but it did occur with frequency. Since they were weekly backup tasks, it took a lot of time to analyze. I ran a myriad of experiments... basically everything I could think of.
After running over a year without problem since using the Windows Task Scheduler instead of the Acronis scheduler, I am convinced there is an issue with the Acronis Scheduler service that was introduced in ATI 2019. I poured over the logs but could not come up with an explanation so whatever it is is not reflected in a tell-tale log entry. In my case it was as if ATI could not create the file on the NAS when it thought it had and therefore failed to read it immediately after.
I hope you find an answer to your issue, but be careful of falling down the rat hole.
Thanks for the additional info. More details on what I'm running...
I have a laptop with W11 (WiFi) and a desktop with W10 (wired Ethernet). The desktop sleeps after 15 minutes of inactivity, but wakes up for the backup. Works every time. Yesterday I hooked the laptop up with wired Ethernet and the scheduled backup still failed.
The laptop sleeps when the lid is closed, and this is the one that fails for every scheduled backup, WiFi or wired...any time I open it up and do a manual backup, it succeeds. Today I opened it a few minutes before the scheduled backup and guess what...it worked. So I'm thinking this has something to do with sleep/wake and network connection timing. But this was still with wired Ethernet.
Next step: try this without wired Ethernet AND set the laptop to not sleep when the lid is closed.
Jim, check that you have wake timers enabled in your laptop power options as these are needed to wake up the laptop from sleep to run the backup.
My main system is a HP Omen laptop and it has been running backups using the wake option for the past three years where the laptop is closed (lid) and either sleeping or hibernated due to inactivity. I have backups to my own Synology NAS being performed as well as to USB & local drives.
Jim, the issue I had was not related to sleep as it failed on wide awake machines. I even went so far as to schedule a wake up task to assure the machine was awake a few minutes before the backup starts. I also assure the NAS is awake.
To create a wake up task in the Windows Task Scheduler, just schedule the task with the necessary options to wake the machine, and the action can be a simple call to wscript /b, which will do nothing.
Steve: the laptop was waking up, or else the backup wouldn't have started, so that's at least not the bulk of the problem. However, it is now solved - as I suspected, it's the network.
Not Acronis' fault, not the scheduler's fault. The laptop is waking up, but the network card is either 1) not waking up, or 2) taking too long. As a result, the DNS lookup for the NAS fails, and thus the network share is "inaccessible".
I set the "what closing the lid does" on the laptop to "Do nothing", and now every scheduled backup is successful.
Thanks for the contributions folks!
Dear JIM TEAGUE,
Thank you for the update.