Backup says destination not found

Mike, please see forum topic: Acronis Backup (BU) Using Rotating USB Drives - where another user worked with me on resolving a similar issue with rotating drives and has written up the procedure that he is now using.

Thanks Steve. I see other people have used complicated solutions to using rotating drives. I have been using rotating drives for years with ATI and it worked fine. I only needed one backup job, and I didn't have to put special files on the external backup drives to identify them.  The backup job happily put backups in the folder G:\BackupLaptop each day regardless of which external drive was plugged in, as long as it was drive G and had the right folder.

This problem began a week ago when I installed a new internal drive in my laptop (cloned from the old drive). The first ATI backup failed because the laptop's internal drive ID changed. Fair enough. I restarted the backup and it worked.  But now it fails every day because it's looking for the external backup drive to have a particular drive ID. When I reselect the backup drive and folder, the backup works perfectly. But next day with the next external HDD in the cycle, the same failure occurs. The backup runs at 12:30am each day so I have to wake up to kick it back to its senses.

I'm sure there's a way to make it work as it always did, but I'm not sure how.

Mike, not sure how this was working for you previously apart from perhaps the underlying Script (.tib.tis) file being from a much earlier version of ATI, but all recent versions have stored the drive unique identifier in the Acronis database and it is this that is now tripping you up when you change drives.  There is no switch available to tell ATI to not reference the drive ID, hence users are resorting to different methods of overcoming this.

The other method is to have a separate backup task for each different backup drive.

Mike, a further late thought, see forum topic: External USB drive not detected after nightly rotation - where the user used symbolic links to overcome the drive ID issue.

Thanks a lot for the ideas, Steve. The symbolic link is very clever - so clever it makes me nervous. I think I'll make 3 backup tasks, one for each backup drive. I saw another post with pre commands that looked for a particular file on the backup drive. Is that necessary? Can't I just have 3 backup tasks all scheduled to run?  All 3 will try to run  each day. 2 will fail because they'll find the wrong drive, and the 3rd will succeed.

Mike, you will always have the final choice as to the method you take.  Having 3 backups tasks, one per each different drive is probably the simplest approach, however, if you leave all 3 tasks to run every time, then you should change the default Error Handling settings on the Advanced page of the task Options.  The default settings would cause the failed task to keep retrying over and over.

Personally I disable all Error Handling for my own backup tasks, preferring to let a task fail just once and tell me so, without sending out a load of email notifications for each failure / retry attempt.

Using a simple Pre Command to test for the drive being present can also cause the task to fail a little more gracefully!  All that is needed is to create a small, empty text file in the root folder of the backup drive, i.e.  BackupDrive1.txt  then test for this in the Pre Command.

@echo off
if exist e:\BackupDrive1.txt (exit /b 0)
exit /b 1

The above should be typed into another small text file and saved as such as 'CheckDrive1.bat' and this selected for the Pre Command.  Then do the same for the second & third drives, adjusting the content for BackupDrive2 / 3 and saving as CheckDrive2 / 3.bat.

The main line above (if exist file (exit /b 0) ) will cause the command to exit as successful if the drive is connected, otherwise (exit /b 1) will signal that the command failed and the task is to be aborted.

I already have a pre command on my backup job.  It's a VB Script that deletes the oldest backup file if needed to make space for the new backup file.  I'll have to add something equivalent to the top of my existing vbs. Do you know the equivalent vbs commands?

EDIT: I found the vbs command to quit with an error code: WScript.Quit 1

Here's a way to have just one batch file which Acronis calls as a pre command with a parameter, for example "precommand.bat 1" or "precommand.bat 2".  I also simplified by using "if not exist".

text of precommand.bat:

@echo off
if not exist e:\BackupDrive%1.txt (exit /b 1)
 

Mike, thanks for your update, there will be lots of different ways of achieving the same end but best to use what works for you.

My backup with rotating external hard drives is working great now.  Thanks a lot for the guidance Steve.  I have 3 backup tasks, one for each of my 3 external USB drives. They run daily at 12:30am, 12:32am and 12:34am. Each day, one task succeeds and 2 fail, as expected.  However, there's a fine point that's bothering me.

Each task has a Pre command which is a VB Script that looks for a particular file on the external drive and exits with errorlevel 1 if the file is not found. The tasks are set to "Abort the operation if the user command fails." Yet the tasks don't abort because of the Pre command. They proceed anyway, and fail because they see the wrong external drive.

Here's the relevant part of the Pre program VBS:

ExtDriveName = Arg(0)
ExtDriveFile = "G:\" & ExtDriveName & ".txt"
If not filesys.FileExists(ExtDriveFile) Then
    WScript.Quit 1
end if

Here's an excerpt of the log file for one of the failed tasks:

Child process has exited with code '1'.
Execution of user command succeeded: C:\Bat\BackupDeleteOld.vbs
Error 0xb0428: The backup location was not found on the destination drive. Make sure the correct storage device is connected to the computer.
 

The Pre command exited with code '1', yet Acronis thinks it succeeded. How do I make Acronis think the Pre command failed so it aborts?

Mike, sorry but there have been long term issues with getting ATI to correctly recognise exit codes for Pre / Post Commands.  It should not be writing these 2 lines to the log as they should be mutually exclusive!

Child process has exited with code '1'.
Execution of user command succeeded: C:\Bat\BackupDeleteOld.vbs

You may need to consider taking a different approach here by controlling the correct ATI task launch from a batch file (or vbs script) which is launched from the Windows Task Scheduler where all testing for which particular drive is connected is done within that control script.

I have been testing on a variation of this type of script for my Cloud backup tasks where the intent was to test that I was connected to my home network and only run the Cloud tasks if I was.

See the attached MultiDrive.bat file attached as a text file which has the full script plus a simple Post Command that it uses to determine when the backup task has completed to allow cleanup afterwards.