Exclusions no longer excluded

Strange indeed.  I have not seen this before.  I have not had a chance to test, but what do your actual exclusions look like in the application?  For me, when I first look at them, they have nothing before or after, however, when I double click on them, it appends wildcards to the front and back (see screenshot).  Wondering if that might be causing an issue if yours shows the wild cards.  If they aren't, double click on them and let it add the wild cards and see if that does anything.

What happens if you add new exclusions for each and put the full path in them as well?  Clearly, something is messed up, but maybe this will get the exlcusions working again.

i.e. instead of just the default "pagefile.sys" add a new entry for "C:\pagefile.sys"

If all else fails, I can only recommend removing the existing backup task, then try adding a new backup job, but point it to an existing .backup .tib, configure the new task and hope that does the trick (or just start a new job completley if you have the space).

Thanks for the suggestions, but I've pretty well done these already. When I first noticed the problem I created a new job, to a new destination, with the same settings (a somewhat longer list of exclusions, which included a full path to the VeraCrypt .hc file I wanted excluded) but the problem continued.

A couple days later I cloned the job to another new one, again to a new destination, and pruned the exclusions list to the bare minimums I listed above. These show in the GUI just as in the script, and I did this in part to avoid possible problems with folders that ATIH was surrounding with wildcards, as you describe.

I could try specifying full paths, but that was not working for the VeraCrypt file before, so I'm guessing it won't help now.

One point I didn't mention before: this problem started slowly after I restored my system from an earlier ATIH backup. Prior to the restore my daily incrementals had been 1GB or less. Following the restore I had a 30GB incremental (which didn't surprise me given the changes due to the restore.) But over the next week the daily incrementals grew from 5GB to around 15GB, where they've stayed since.

As a next step I may try an uninstall and reinstall, and recreating the job -- though I'm getting low on backup space...

JWells,

I think you have a good recovery support case here.  I suggest that for one you use the Feedback feature of the application to report your circumstance in detail and reference this Forum thread making sure your submission includes a System Report.  You will find the Feedback feature in the Help section of the application.

I would then create a support ticket on the Support web page indicating you problem is for Recovery again with a complete detailed discrption of the problem and referencing this Forum thread.

As suggested, I've submitted Feedback (with a System Report) and a Recovery support case. We'll see what the response is...

Thanks.

No joy on the Recovery Case. They wanted PPI, which I am very reluctant to do.

I had already tried an uninstall followed by running the TI 2015 Cleanup Tool (why is there no 2016 tool?) and restart, followed by a reinstall and recreation of the job. But this did not solve the problem: exclusions were still included in the backups.

Before giving up on ATIH 2016, I tried this again, but this time, after running the Cleanup Tool and restarting, I went back and deleted any leftovers I could find:

* a couple keys under HKLM\Software\Acronis\BackupAndRecovery

* a few folders under ProgramData\Acronis; these required yet another restart before I could delete them (despite no open handles reported)

After this I reinstalled and reconfigured the job. Fortunately the exclusions are now working again.

Perhaps this will help someone else.

Glad you got it resolved!  

Yes, the 2015 cleanup tool should have removed that registry key and the folder in program data on it's own.  It may have been a permission issue that left the folder in programdata as you had to restart again.  One time, I had to take ownerhsip of this folder, re-populate permissions and then I could delete it.  Normally this is all done with the 2015 cleanup tool (which works for 2016) and I've only had to do the ownerhsip and permiossions on that one machine, which the cleanup tool had also previously worked on.  

That particular directory in programdata is where the database is maintained so it looks like since it was not being removed at uninstall or with the cleantook, it was being re-used when the installation later happened.  It is definitely good to know that this folder may not always be removed though - why or how the permissions are getting messed up for some, that is another issue.

Thanks for letting us know!