Email reports backup has failed - Activity screen shows success
I have 3 backups that run nightly. C: drive, D: drive, and a cloud backup. The first two are system images with a new full image every 7 days followed by differential backups for 6 days. I have this same setup on two computers backing up to their own external hard drive. I have the latest build, 20770, on both computers.
I receive emails when there is a problem. Both computers have shown the same behaviour. I receive three emails (one for each backup) that states the backup has failed. The backup screen in the program has a red X with the words, "the latest backup has failed." However, the Activity screen shows all is well and the backups worked successfully. The wording in the email suggests the backup succeeded but doesn't report on the success of the validation. This happens on two computers independent of each other. It does not happen every day. One computer yesterday, the other one today.
I've attached a text file with the email contents and three screen shots to show the Backup, Activity, and Subscription screens.
First, did these run okay? Second, why the conflicting information?
Thanks.
PS: As I went through the email to remove any personal information, I see a line that states I need to activate the product. The product is activated and shows I'm licensed for almost another full year. See the screenshot.
Sometimes validation run immediately after the completion of a backup task will fail. This sounds to be the case for you. Have you tried to run validation on the tasks that display the red x again? I am certain if you do that the red x will disappear. If the validations as setup in the backup task will run and complete or not is another question.
Thank you for your insights. Using the log viewer, I see that the local backups fail during the last stage of the job - either the validation or the clean-up of old versions. The cloud backup job just stops reporting.
But, under the activity screen, each of these backups reports a successful validation and clean-up. I've attached two screen shots of one of the "failures". The log just stops reporting after the last clean-up event, but apparently all is well.
Compared to "successful" backups the only line missing from the log is "Operation has succeeded."
It appears that something interrupts the logging process which causes an error to be displayed and emailed. There are no application or system events in my Event Viewer logs that show any trouble.
I've completed a repair installation, so we'll see if that changes anything.
The log you posted is that of the task applying cleanup rules. Do you have the task set to shutdown the PC after the task completes? It might be possible that shutdown occurs before logging is complete for the task.
No, the computer is not set to shut down, nor does it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Darryl, have you tried disabling the validation option for your backup tasks to see if you still get the same errors?
Can you post the actual ti_demon log files for one of these issues so that we can look at the detailed diagnostic messages that may be present?
Your log image shows you are doing a disk backup but using a backup task that came from an earlier version of ATI as it is using the older .tib file format. The log itself does not appear to show any error for the backup, validation or automatic cleanup actions being performed.
Steve, no I have not tried disabling the validation. Based on what I see with the logs, I'm not sure it will help. Let me know if you think otherwise. It's tricky with an intermittent problem, the backups have run without error messages for a few days now.
I've posted 3 log files from 3 separate days in the last week. Failure while validating, failure while cleaning up (after validating successfully), and a successful backup. I hope these are what you're looking for. From your viewer, I selected File, Save As Log File, and renamed it to something meaningful.
Yes, I created this setup in a previous version of True Image and has worked flawlessly for a long time.
I agree, there are no warnings or errors in the log file; it just seems to stop logging while the actual task carries on to completion.
Thanks for your assistance.
I just realized I posted short logs. I've attached the regular version of each log here. I also see that the files were renamed during the upload process, so they are not so meaningful anymore.
Darryl, the thing that I can see in the 3 log files is that the first & last do not have the final line that is shown in the middle one!
22/09/2019 01:14:20 :439 Pending operation 4 started: 'Validate Backup Archive'.
22/09/2019 02:00:15 :355 Operation has succeeded.
The other 2 logs just end without that final statement that the whole operation was successful.
That single difference seems (to me) to be the reason why there is a difference in the information shown on the Backup and Activity pages, i.e. the Backup page says failed or stopped, whereas the Activity pages successful!
Agreed. But, what to do about it?
I'll see how my system performs after doing a repair installation.
After the repair install, I'd also turn off the automatic validation... At least for a time. See if it errors with it off, or not. You can still manually validate if you need/want. If all is looking well after a couple days, turn the automatic validation on and see how it goes for a couple of days.