CPHO erroneously reports "A device attached to the system is not functioning"
After a few nights during which time backups failed because of a full disk (and, incidentally, CPHO was NOT cleaning out old backups as it was configured to do, as usual), I got one successful backup to happen after manually cleaning up.
The following night, CPHO began erroneously reporting "A device attached to the system is not functioning" when trying to back up. I checked the event logs as the help document suggests, but the ONLY message about NTFS or Volsnap in the logs is "Volume ?? (\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy42) is healthy. No action is needed."
So it DID create the snapshot correctly. In fact, it created a bunch of them, one for every time it retried the backup.
I've tried restarting the various Acronis services but it has had no effect. There's plenty of room on the backup drive. It's just yet another ludicrous and completely random failure from this software.
Steve Smith wrote:Nicklas, there is a known issue with Acronis being able to clean up older backup files when there is no free space available on the storage drive. The Acronis clean up versions tool needs around 250MB of free space in order to work!
How did you clear the space on the storage drive and how many files did you delete?
I used the cleanup tool in Acronis itself to remove the ancient backups that it could never be bothered to remove automatically, despite being configured to do so. This is a feature that has never worked reliably. I've had it work successfully for months at a time, and then for reasons completely unknown, it just stops cleaning up automatically. It's very annoying and very stupid that such a simple feature could be so broken.
I was able to get Acronis to start backing up again by killing all its processes from the task killer one-by-one until it finally started backing up again. For some reason, simply restarting its services from services.msc didn't do the trick.
I shouldn't have to hold its hand like this or continually babysit it. I'm just trying to create routine, nightly backups, not solve cold fusion in a bottle.
Nicklas, what option for automatic cleanup are you using here?
There can be lots of confusion around the topic of automatic cleanup which can be better understood if some basic concepts are known!
First: automatic cleanup only works on complete(d) versions / version chains. Do not expect individual elements of version chains to be cleaned up, such as incremental or differential files!
Second: automatic cleanup only runs after a new Full backup for the next version / version chain has been created successfully. This means that there must be sufficient free space available on the storage drive / location to hold a new Full backup image file!
Third: counting of days does not start until after a new Full backup file has been created when using the option to ‘Delete versions / version chains older than X days.’ It does not start for the active backup version / version chain before that point!
Fourth: the simplest & easiest automatic cleanup option to use & understand is to ‘Store no more than X recent versions / version chains.’ The criteria here means that if you set X = 2, then when the X+1 (3rd) version / version chain is created successfully with a new Full backup file, then the oldest version / version chain will be deleted by automatic cleanup.
Example:
Incremental backup task, using Full plus 5 Incremental backups before next new Full backup.
Task scheduled to run daily with automatic cleanup set to ‘Store no more than 2 version chains.’
Day 1 – Full backup created.
Days 2 – 6 Incremental backups created.
Day 7 – Next new Full backup created.
Days 8 – 12 Incremental backups created.
Day 13 – Next new Full backup created. Automatic cleanup deletes files created on days 1 – 6.
If the same task used ‘Delete version chains older than 7 days’, then those 7 days wouldn’t start counting until day 7 for the first set of files (version chain 1) and not until day 13 for the second set etc. So automatic cleanup wouldn’t delete the oldest chain until day 14 in the above example.
That's amazing. Imagine taking such a simple feature- clean out old backups to make space for new ones- and making it SO COMPLEX that it takes six paragraphs to elucidate it.