Acronis' USB drive occasionally opens up in file explorer then closes in a few moments
Every so often a File Explorer window opens up showing the Acronis backup drive (USB thumb drive). The File Explorer then closes in a few moments.
If I "Turn off Acronis Active Protection" this does not happen, although it is hard to be sure if this is the case because it is intermittent and I have only experimented a little.
Does anyone know what's going on?
Robert, I have never seen such behaviour myself, and do not recollect seeing any reports of the same here in the forums!
Leave AAP turned off for a while to see if you still see it happening?
Steve Smith wrote:Leave AAP turned off for a while to see if you still see it happening?
Yes, that's what I have already done but I'm not sure how long I waited. I will try again. The trick is I can only see it if I am sitting at the computer because the window disappears within a few seconds. I can't tell if it is happening when I am not using the computer.
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Another odd thing happened that may or may not be related. The backup is scheduled to run once a day, at night. Last night it failed with a message:
"Backup task execution failed ...
Error 0xb0428: The backup location was not found on the destination drive. Make sure the correct storage device is connected to the computer."
Then about 30 seconds later, without any intervention on my part (I was in bed asleep!), the backup ran successfully.
Enchantech wrote:It is possible that if the Acronis drive is bootable that Active Protection is being triggered by another process or application polling that drive in a manner that is the same as certain ransomware or cryptoware would use. Primarily anything that would be trying to access the boot record could potentially do this.
A possible interaction is Malwarebytes which has some ransomware protection.
Another is "Windows Security" in Windows 10 which also has ransomware protection.
I have no idea exactly what mechanisms they use, but I think they pay attention to bootable devices.
Just a wild stab in the dark!
OK. The occasional opening of File Explorer to the Acronis USB drive occurs even with AAP disabled.
I note that this happened just as I woke the computer from being locked. I also note that there is an Acronis setting related to behavior when locked or running screen saver so that may be what triggered things.
It could easily be that the behavior I observed (opening FIle Explorer to Acronis USB) might have been correlated with screen saver.
When I disable AAP does that completely shut off Acronis? If not, how would I do that?
You can't completely shut off Acronis - it has several background services that do different things. YOu can disable many of the services if you don't use the other features (for instance, I don't use phone backups, or the cloud console so I disable those services and set them to not startup at all).
You can do this manually in computer management (see this KB article for the services - you really only need schedule manager running if you have scheduled backups, and/or AAP if you want to keep active protection for ransomeware protection enabled).
https://kb.acronis.com/content/61624
We also have some generic .bat scripts that can help with this if you just want to double click to turn some services off or on. They are on the MVP Google Drive:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8uZDIFmupY7Njl3VGpxblZnZUk
I think I may have solved this.
Go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager -> Universal Serial Bus controllers.
Scroll down to the various USB entries. Most have a tab for Power Management with a selection to "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power." On my system they were all enabled (checked) so I disabled (unchecked) them all. Since then my problem seems to have gone away.
I will monitor the situation for a while. Once I am convinced that really did the trick I will re-enable them incrementally to see which is the trouble maker. It may take some time to get through that experiment. I think there were four I unchecked. I'll try two at a time to narrow it down.
USB selective suspend / power saving has been an issue for some users but not all, so guess the impact depends on how quickly the device 'wakes up' from such a state.
If you find that your power settings are causing the behavior you can change it by modifying AutoPlay options for Removable devices in Settings.
Type AutoPlay in Windows search then select AutoPlay from the top left menu.
Under Choose AutoPlay defaults you will see Removeable drive.
Click the down arrow to change the option.
Select Take no action.
The result will be that when your drive powers up from a low power state or you plug the device in you will not be asked what to do with that device nor will any action such as the device opening in File Explorer happen.
Enchantech wrote:If you find that your power settings are causing the behavior you can change it by modifying AutoPlay options for Removable devices in Settings.
Type AutoPlay in Windows search then select AutoPlay from the top left menu.
Under Choose AutoPlay defaults you will see Removeable drive.
Click the down arrow to change the option.
Select Take no action.
The result will be that when your drive powers up from a low power state or you plug the device in you will not be asked what to do with that device nor will any action such as the device opening in File Explorer happen.
That looks like a more reasonable way to deal with this -- will undo my previous fix and try that.
Let us know how it works for you.
Enchantech wrote:Let us know how it works for you.
It dd not work well.
My experiment:
- Enable the device manager's "allow the computer to turn off device to save power" in all USB devices that offer the choice. This is actually the default.
- Set AutoPlay, removable drive, to "take no action" as opposed to "open folder." This is NOT the default.
RESULTS: The USB drive occasional disconnects.
A GUESS: This may have nothing to do with Acronis! It could be the computer "saving power." Google "USB spontaneously disconnects" for reports of this behavior unrelated to Acronis.
A FURTHER GUESS: The behavior I reported earlier (failed backup followed immediately by successful backup) maybe due to Acronis attempting to access the spontaneously dismounted drive and thereby triggering a remount (AutoPlay?) allowing the backup to retry successfully.
As I had it earlier (my previous experiment):
- Disabled "allow the computer to turn off device to save power." This is contrary to the default.
- AutoPlay left at its default to "open folder."
RESULTS: This seemed to work but I may not have observed it long enough to be sure. I will set it back to this configuration and give it more time to prove itself.
MEANWHILE: I will peruse the results of the above Google search and see if there are any sensible resolutions. (None of this re-install everything stuff for me!)
Thanks for the feedback. I suspect your GUESS is correct. The issue you see is the result of Windows Power Management.
Hope you find an acceptable solution.
I should update this!
My solution was to go into device manager and uncheck "allow computer to turn off device to save power" for all the USB devices that offered this choice. That solved my problem.
I was intending to narrow down which setting was the one to do the job, but never got around to that.
Windows then updated itself from build 1809 to 1903. Lo and behold it undid all of my "unchecking" except for one: USB Mass Storage Device. It left that unchecked and my problem remains resolved.
Thus my question is answered!
Robert, thanks for the update / feedback on this issue.