[WORKAROUND] Backup job fails, file in use - ATIH misses to ask for credentials
ATIH 2016 b6027
Recently I had to completely remove and reinstall ATIH after this issue happened out of the blue
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/109772
Now after some weeks again my Acronis troubles me on the same machine. Generating error messages I simply fail to understand a reason for. Backup starts and then stops, assumingly after creating a snapshot and before the actual backup process starts.
If this application would just do its job reliable, I would be very very pleased. (It does do that on a couple of machines).
I still have list of issues with Acronis, some are reproducible and some others just appear out of a sudden or on just some computers (speaking about more than a dozend computers I run or administer ATIH 2016 on).
It was great to participate in the beta and after that to help to improve this application so it meets my idea of an ideal backup and restore companion.
Though at some point I really lost my faith that this forum is helpful enough to solve some tenancious issues, after the beta.
I have to say that the list of fixed issues, where other customers, MVP's or me participated is very long, but still I miss reliability and understandable error messages!
While I have write and read permissions on this share and ntfs based, this application bothering me. As you can see it was working for a while.
I really cannot afford to spend hours to contact the official Acronis customer support for every tiny thing that does not work as expected.
Hi Karl,
I can certainly understand your frustrations. Question, on your troubling machines using File Explorer can you view the network locations where your backups are located?
I found that after the Win 10 10586 -3 update that network discovery was broken on Win 10 Pro installations and some Win 10 Home installs as well. This was later confirmed as a wide spread problem effecting most of the user base whom had muktiple machines in a network both small and large. Finally Microsoft acknowledged that this was a known bug and a fix would be forthcoming with the next major release of Win 10 that was said to be available in March.
Over the last couple of days all my Win 10 installs received cumulative update KB3124262 which at present seems to have fixed this issue. Now network discovery works as it is supposed to on my machines so problem resolved I think.
After I discovered this bug I spent countless hours/days trying to find a workaround. Most would work for awhile and then suddenly stop working. I finally realized that when I would get things half way working right and then a machine would be shutdown and or rebooted for some reason that would break things again.
Don't wish to bore you with all the details but you might try updating these machines with the KB3124262 release and see if that might help woth your issues.
Hi Enchantech, Windows 10 has serious issues with networks since the first insider build back in 2014, but Microsoft only adressed them partly.
Last week we decided to completely dump the usage of the HomeNetwork Group feature is it gets broken often enough by cumulative updates, especially since November 2015.
The only solution is to completely leave and recreate the Homenetgroup which started to bother us too much. I would understand if Acronis would bug out because this, as then access is not working properly. But that's not the case here.
Now we have created our user accounts on the target system with guest rights and using file shares like in the past with file share and ntfs permissions and everything is working more reliable than before using the Homenetgroup and simplified permisson system.
File Explorer (Windows Explorer) is correctly working imho, and also the Netbios services seem to work correctly as all machines are visible and accessible in the network neighbourhood.
I have gave Paragon a meanwhile and my network backup works very except for ATIH. So thats again an indicator something went wrong for Acronis as both would use same permissions and SMB file share.
I am not yet willing to give up and switch the product, yet.
Hi Karl,
Well, I spoke to soon as to the latest KB update addressing the network discovery issue in Win 10. My issues have come back with this. You are correct in the Homegroup scenario, and the reason there again is the network discovery feature of Win 10 is borken.
Unfortunately for users until MS decides to release the fix for the issue we all suffer. It is reported that the latest insider build of Win 10 contains this fix. I have an install running an insider build however it is on the Slow Track so I have yet to receive that update so I cannot verify that.
I do not use the Homegroup as I use Workgroup for my network. The discovery issue is much more accute when using Workgroup. There are workarounds posted for addressing the issue but none of them really address the problem or if implemented can and do create new problems.
I think that TI has fallen victim to this as well. If in fact this problem is at root to your issues I have no idea. At any rate the latest KB update will not help. Hope you get it sorted out.
Well thanks for your help anyway. I am not that sure that the cause is the update, because Paragon working with that fileshare and also normal file transfer is ok. Maybe there are sideeffects but as you said I have no idea my own.
I've located the issue! @Dmitry @Enchantech
my network drive B on both affected computers was mapped to \\nas\backups with impersonated with user rights using a local account on the computer "NAS" (backup target)
Now that we dissolved the Windows HomeNetGroup and added our accounts to the computer NAS the network drive still worked properly but Acronis was not happy with that change because he still tried to use the old user credentials to authenticate and failed. However, Windows did not fail to authenticate using the same credentials. Keep this in mind.
Now that I tried to make a file based backup (refer here: https://forum.acronis.com/de/node/99462) (screenshot_21.png) even on this newly created job ATIH refused to backup on drive B aka \\nas\backups.
But this time after it failed ATIH showed up a message about improper connection credentials (connection.png), that never came up with the regular backup job on both computers.
Solution:
- removed all mapped network drives and remapped them without the impersonated credetials, as they are not longer needed)
In a short:
- it happened that ATIH tried to authenticate with old permission and failed while the entered credentials would be still valid.
- after reconnecting all my mapped network drives, not using the impersonation of the local user but using the authentication travesal, that happens automatically in windows, when user exists on both computers, it worked.
I am sorry I cannot explain it very plain in english but I hope you understand the situation. If you have any question about this please don't hesistate to contact me.
The major problem here was that Acronis failed to backup, while never bringing up the dialogue to check the connection credentials - instead bringing up a message about file in use, which was not true because he did not even try to write a file.
- of course because the SMB authentication worked in the first place but using a different user (the one that was stored in the mapped drive).
Unfortunately I am not able to repeat the things to solve the issue on the computer of my gf.
She still has the issue that ATIH cannot write on the network share even though Windows is able to.I have attached her recent system report.
Dear Dmitry I am now able to reproduce the issue.
For this SMB / FTP speed issues topic I've created some test jobs. ATIH did not ask for permissions in all cases and in those where ATIH did not ask for permissions (while ATIH was able to browse the target SMB share, though) the backup job failed with the quoted issue "file in use".
I hope we can now start to investigate this problem. Thank you for your time in advance.
Hello everyone,
the Acronis Customer support contacted me and was able to solve the issue.
Problem:
The issue I have, if it happens, is permanent and reproducible if a user backups to a SMB target and the permissions to this SMB target / share changes later on. The user will not get asked to alter permissions for this existing backup job / occassionally also not for newly created ones, instead ATIH will fail to backup quoting "file in use" > see original post and screenshots
Cause:
Based on the support agents feedback the feature to change saved credentials in Windows has been dropped in ATIH 2016.
Solution / Workaround:
ATIH 2016 do save the needed credentials in the Windows registry:
HKCU\Software\Acronis\Connections\
HKCU = HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Deleting all subkeys below the parent key "Connections" will delete the saved credentials.
ATIH will then show that credentials are missing for this job / target, and allow to enter them. But again once they have been entered they cannot be changed in the UI. If the user needs to change the permissions, he would need to delete the registry keys again.
--
Conclusion:
Imho, there should be an option to change saved credentials for each job in the options as soon network targets / authentication is involved. Currently I fail to understand why the behaviour of ATIH has been changed. The Linux Recovery environment does not suffer from this issue, as credentials aren't saved permanently.
Thanks again to Andrei for his perfect support.