Acronis 2019 hosed my thumb drive
I use Acronis 2019 to back up my laptop (Windows 10) to a thumb drive. The other night I went to run it, and the backup scheme referenced drive F: for the thumb drive. My laptop assigned drive E: to the thumb drive. So I created a new backup scheme with referencing E: and ran the backup, which completed normally. So I deleted the backup scheme for drive F:, since that was no longer applicable. It asked me if I wanted to also delete associated files, and I said yes. It said it could not delete all the associated files. So I removed the thumb drive from the laptop, but now when I insert the thumb drive, my laptop beeps as if it is recognizing a new device, but my thumb drive does not show up at all in file explorer.
I thought it hosed my laptop, but other thumb drives function normally. I tried plugging the thumb drive into my main PC (an old W10 machine from 2011, but very beefy). When I plug it in, the old PC recognizes it as a thumb drive and adds a drive letter for it, but gives me the message, "You need to format the disk in drive <drive letter>: before you can use it. Do you want to format it now?" So I guess I will reformat it, and do another backup on my PC. BTW, I could never understand how two devices running W10 can perform so differently sometimes.
When you delete an ATI backup task and take the option to delete the associated files, then this is just calling functions in the OS to do the file management and should have no impact on the file system or formatting of the storage drive.
Yes and no. It depend how imaginative the coders were in anticipating errant user and app behavior. In this case, the drive letter being passed was incorrect, and who knows what the functions actually did. One of the problems with backup apps seems to be dealing with drive letters. The PC may not always assign the same drive letter to external device, such as a thumb drive. A long time ago I used Norton Ghost to image my Windows XP PC. I loaded the image to a new HD, and it scrambled all the external drive letters, causing problems for me.
I tried to reformat the thumb drive -- I let it run all night, and this morning, the thumb-drive light had stopped blinking, and the W10 app wasn't happy when I tried to shut it down, saying it wasn't formatted yet, so I guess it's toast.
You have a point about external HDD drives -- I use a Seagate external drive to back up my main PC -- it works fine (so far), and I have reinstalled an image 3 times on my PC without problems. And the prices on external drives have really dropped -- I saw an advertisement from Costco for an external drive at a dirt-cheap price. And I bet Acronis can do a backup to an external hard drive faster than a USB stick (my laptop only has USB 2.0).