External USB drive not detected after nightly rotation
I have been using Acronis on the same computer since 2013, and upgraded each year and have never had any issues with my nightly backup schedule, until Acronis 2016.
I have a very simple backup regime which is as follows:
- I have 2 External USB hard drives that I rotate each night, and make sure I take 1 home offsite in case of fire or theft.
- Both USB drives are Set to F:\
- I only do a Full Back up, so there is no chain at all.
- I manually do a clean-up of space removing old backups.
As mentioned I have been using this backup method since Acronis 2013 and have never had an issue until I recently upgraded to Acronis 2016.
The error message I receive is: “The Backup location was not found on the destination drive. Make sure the correct storage device is connected to the computer.”
This error message comes up every time I have rotated the external USB Hard drive earlier in the day. The drive is detected and browseable in windows, just for some reason Acronis won’t recognize it.
The only way I can get Acronis to recognize it and not fail the backup job is to manually go in and reselect the destination F:\
I have never had this issue with any other Acronis, just Acronis 2016. I think this is a bug in the software.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Thank you for the reply Steve, much appreciated.
The problem with having 2 separate backup jobs for the 2 external USBs is that if I’m not able to change the hard drive because I’m out of the office, or I get sick for a day, the backup will fail because the wrong hard drive will be connected.
I could get around that by setting both backup jobs to run regardless of what day it is, but this will give me an error notification every single night for the drive that isn’t connected.
Is there any other work around that i could do?
Perhaps edit the registry to have Acronis bypass the UUID check?
Thank you
Jim, unfortunately there are no registry hacks that I am aware of that would tell ATIH to bypass the UUID check.
The other way around this would be to setup a simple Pre/Post Command to check for the presence of your backup drive or a particular file on that drive and only perform the backup if that check is successful.
See the attached document that I used a little while back to delete a backup file using a Pre Command batch file - you could adapt this to your scenario.
Thank you Steve for the PDF with the script; that is definitely a good work around.
After doing some playing around, I came up with a simpler solution to my problem, which is to create a Symbolic Link. This essentially tricks Acronis into thinking the backup destination is on my C Drive, whereas the real location is actually my external USB F Drive. As the UUID of my C drive will always remain the same, I can plug in any external USB drive and when the UUID is checked it shows my C Drive :-)
Thank you again Steve, I do appreciate your input, and have saved your script in case I need something similar in the future.
Jim, thanks for the feedback with your solution, this may help others trying to do the same.
As others may look to this thread for help with the same issue, I will provide a little more detail. Still very simple but the order of these steps is important in order to bypass Acronis UUID checks.
Acronis does not let you use Symbolic Links as a Backup destination, but you can trick it by using the following method.
Step 1- Create your backup Job as per normal, but for the destination option, browse to a location that you will use to trick Acronis into thinking that is the real location. Then have Acronis create a folder inside that location calling it “Backups” or whatever you like.
Step 2- Make sure you have saved your backup settings, then Exit out of Acronis.
Step 3- Browse to the newly created Backups folder and delete it.
Step 4- Open CMD as an Administrator and type the following command but modify for your chosen folder name that you just created with Acronis, and real backup location.
mklink /d E:\Backups X:\Backups
In the above example I am creating a Symbolic link in my dummy location E:\Backups and pointing it to my real location X:\Backups
Step 5 – Open Acronis and run a test Backup. Acronis should be none the wiser that you have switched the Original Backup destination Folder with a Symbolic Link.
Thats it Done!
Acronis really should have a user option to disable UUID checking for external USB media. Hopefully they fix this in future builds.
Anyway hope this helps someone out there.
Jim,
I am bookmarking this thread...
Thanks for sharing your expertise and thanks for the feedback.
FtrPilot
I switched from a full E drive to new drive which my computer is calling the F drive. I have had all sorts of problems since then. It is looking for prior tib files. The desination folders get deleted, then suddenly reappear, its a mystery. Last night there was no Acronis folder in the F drive at all. Now it is doing a Files Backup and both folders are there. Although, I had to hit ignore, when I got the error message.
I have two schemes F:Acronis/EntirePC and F:Acronis/Files Backup
I am afraid if I follow your steps Acronis will still be looking for missing prior files. I was about to delete the program and reinstall, but will try this if you think it will work. Thank you.
HnLA, in this instance I do not think that using a symbolic link will help as the issue is the change of physical drive. I will reply further in your original post #122286 rather than confusing this post.