Cloud storage full??

Jeremy, this is one of those issues where you are best advised to open a Support Case directly with Acronis.  They can investigate this with you and also do any cleanup that may be needed on their Cloud servers, plus this will serve as a prompt for the developers to look at the options being offered to users for managing cloud storage as well as identifying why you are being told you have used more storage than your subscription allows (1.3TB vs 1.0TB).

Thanks Steve.  Have followed your suggestion and will report back with any insights gained.  As of now, the cloud back up is (slowly) continuing.

Jeremy, hope that support can help with this matter and clarify about the usage.  The only other thought here is to ensure that you are backing up to the nearest Cloud access point to where you live.  You cannot change this for any existing backups but as you have been using this for some years, it is possible that there are more choices available now than when you got started?

See KB 4350: Acronis Backup to Cloud access ports and hostnames for more information on where these are located.

Thanks for this further suggestion Steve.  I will definitely look into this when my currently (still) ongoing cloud backup completes as my current destination, wherever that server is, is pretty slow.

Apart from an acknowledgement, no response official response as yet to my "ticket" query (submitted September 22).

I think email tickets have up to 5 days for response.  I usually try to chat with someone to get it going ASAP. You should be able to call too if you have a version with Acronis Protection.

I've been reading that many backup applications are priortizing support for those effected by the hurricanes.  DriveSavers was even offering free recovery for one hard drive, but only during specific time frames.

Thanks Bobbo.  I got a response from Acronis this morning which really just said my storage was full and I had either to purchase more, or delete files (either manually or via the clean-up tool).

I had, of course, already attempted both these solutions but without any apparent impact on the overall size of the files stored on the cloud.  Indeed I have now attempted to (a) pause the cloud back-up and then (b) use the clean-up 3 times.   In each case it tells me that 25GB will be freed by using the clean-up but after each attempt, despite the clean-up being reported "complete", no change takes place to the amount of data stored.  Indeed if I try the clean-up again it still reports that 25GB of data will be freed by using the tool.  IE it seems the clean up is having zero effect.

I wonder if it is possible that the clean-up will not work while a back-up job is paused but not yet completed?  IE I have to wait until this back up completes before attempting to remove files.

 The other thing that is confusing me is that my cloud back-up (which happily seems to re-start after I have paused it despite my storage being declared "full") reports that there is (currently) less than 300GB of data to recover - this is roughly the same as the amount of data it has so far managed to back up since this particular back-up job started several days ago.  The full back up size (currently about 50% complete) is reported as being 725GB.  This 725GB figure is also consistent with the estimated size of the back up job on the "Choose files and folders" screen for the job.

If I cannot resolve this, I think my only option may be to delete the whole back up and start again.  I am somewhat reluctant to do this as my experience is that 750GB will take over a week to upload.  However, one advantage will be that I can then choose a different server (as Steve suggests above).  I think my current server is in France whereas I am located in UK.  Is there any way to find out what server offers the fastest upload speed (other than trial and error)?

Thanks for all the suggestions and help so far!

Jeremy, perhaps starting afresh on your local UK Cloud servers based in London would be better than using the French servers in Strasburg.  I had to do similar at one point for one of my backup tasks that had defaulted to France before the UK servers were introduced perhaps?  All my backups are now directed to the London cloud servers.

Thought I should update everyone where this has ended.

I received a further response from Acronis Support that suggested amongst other things that I film my experience with the cloud backup and email it to them.  It seemed a fairly complicated set of instructions.

So I decided to wait until the latest version of my ongoing cloud backup finally completed which it did after running for over a week in total. It reported that 760GB of data had been backed up and was available for recovery. But the system still said my Cloud storage was overfull now with 1.6TB compared to my 1TB allowance.

I decided to try the Acronis cloud clean-up process once again (in case it might work now that the ongoing backup had completed). I first tried the basic clean up options which (as before) indicated 25GB could be freed by deleting permanently all my deleted files and by removing any versions older than 1 week. This clean up appeared to activate but (as before) it made no difference to the total amount of data reported to be stored on the cloud (I.E. it did not appear to remove even 25GB).   And when I looked at trying a repeat clean up it still said there were 25GB that could be removed.

So I then tried the "advanced" clean up option in the Acronis tool and set it to delete all but 1 version of the backup. When this clean up completed, the total stored data was reported as reduced to around 760GB - i.e. I had finally managed to delete something on the Cloud and was now within my 1TB allowance. The message saying my cloud storage was full also disappeared.

So I thought "Success at last!"

I then had a message that there was a new version of ATIH2018 available and so I installed this new version. When the PC rebooted and I loaded ATIH again I was stunned to see it once again reported my cloud storage was full at 1.6TB. So it appeared I was right back with my original problem. I tried again to use the advanced clean-up tool just as I had done before but this time it made no difference.

This was obviously a great disappointment.  I then reviewed my options of working with Acronis Support to film what was going on, compress the video and send it along with various logs to try to solve the problem or just cut my losses and delete the whole existing backup and start again (and in doing so switch to the UK Acronis cloud server.  I chose the second option.

To my relief deleting the cloud backup did release all the space so I was back to 1TB available.  I then set up the backup all over again (it's basically a selection of files and folders) and chose the London server.  The 760GB back up has now been running for several days and will take a few more to complete.

Quite what caused this problem is therefore still not clear.  I suspect it has something to do with it being a longstanding backup (I started it around 2 years ago) and had to revise it significantly 3 months or so ago when I had to rebuild my windows PC (which led to some of the disk drive letters changing and along with that some of the file/folder addresses).  It may also have been affected by upgrading Acronis versions.  Anyway, I would like to make it clear that the support staff did try to help and it was my decision to deploy the solution I chose.

Hope this saga may be of help to someone else in the future.  Last message: do not rely on a cloud backup as your only one.  Always have it as one part of a diverse collection of protection.

Jeremy, thanks for the update / feedback.  Glad you are approaching a more settled status for your cloud backup and hope this completes without further issue now you are going to the UK servers.